Passing It On

My dad didn’t want me to do an English degree. He didn’t really want me to go to university at all, to be honest: nobody else in my family had ever been, and he didn’t see why it should start with me. He probably wouldn’t have minded if I’d wanted to do something vocational, like Law. But English: no. ‘What use is that going to be, sitting around for three years reading books when you could be out earning?’ he’d grumble. Eventually, my A level English teacher invited him into school for a meeting and explained that there were all manner of things that I’d be able to do as an English graduate, but even when I got into Oxford, there were still rumblings about finding a job in an office somewhere local. We were like Tony Harrison and his dad in the poem ‘Book Ends’: what was between us was not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books, and my desire to study them.

For a huge chunk of my life I have thought that I was never more myself than when I was seventeen, reading anything and everything, walking home from school with a head full of ideas. Over the last few months, I’ve thought that I have never been more myself than I have over the past year, working away on the book that for a long time didn’t have a name but then became Reading Lessons: the books we read at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter. It’s been the distillation of twenty-eight years of teaching English, and of ten or so years before that studying it at school and at university. For most of that time, I realise, I’ve been fighting. Not just to be able to study English at degree level myself, but most importantly – and most fundamentally – against all those voices that tell us that studying English is an indulgence, a frippery, something that will never lead to a serious job of serious work. I’ve fought because it is a fight worth having.

This week, the day after Reading Lessons was introduced to the world in The Bookseller, The Times published an article that illustrates exactly why I’m writing this book. In the article, Emma Duncan describes ‘the decline of English as a subject for study at university’ as ‘a healthy development. Literature is lovely stuff but it’s not a way to earn your bread’. The drop in the number of young people applying to read arts and humanities subjects should be cheered, according to Duncan. Universities do our young people no favours if they pretend that studying English and humanities subjects will lead to a career that will make up for the ‘piles of debt’ that students will rack up during their time at university. Do a STEM subject instead, Duncan recommends – or a degree apprenticeship.

What Duncan argues is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, one of the objections made to the infant academic discipline of English was that it was a mere indulgence, ‘chatter about Shelley’. Why did people need to study English literature at university, detractors reasoned, when they could read the books themselves at home? What were students of English actually learning, and what were they being examined upon? The subject’s supporters responded by filling the earliest English degrees full of knowledge that could be tested. ‘Mention some of the chief public events that happened during Shakespeare’s boyhood.’ ‘Make a list of Pope’s chief works in chronological order, with brief descriptions.’ ‘Write notes on the Interlude, the Heroic Play, the Opera, and the burlesque or satiric drama before 1800.’ It’s the stuff of knowledge organisers, of retrieval practice and MCQs. One question, set at Manchester in the early 1880s, invited students to give an outline of any one of the Canterbury Tales: the following year, at King’s College London, students were asked to ‘quote any passage from “Christabel”’.

You could be forgiven for thinking that some of today’s arguments about the teaching of English – about powerful knowledge and cultural capital, direct instruction or the shared construction of meanings – are really just a rehashing of these old debates about what kind of subject English actually is. But actually, articles like Emma Duncan’s should remind us that our real battle is a much bigger one. It’s to get people – our students, their parents, employers, politicians, society at large – to recognise the importance of what we do in English, and in the arts and humanities more widely. And we need to fight hard, and passionately, and with commitment.

One of the best and most persuasive books I’ve read recently on the subject of English is Bob Eaglestone’s Literature: Why It Matters (2019). Eaglestone redefines literature not as a particular body of texts – a definition that is notoriously troublesome – but as a ‘living conversation’. It argues that studying literature is about participating in a discourse that is endlessly evolving, adding one’s own voice to the thousands of others that have taken part in this conversation over time. And this is a conversation not just about books, but about ideas: about justice, society and civilisation, equality, relationships and responsibility. It’s a conversation about what it means to be a human being in a world that is currently in a pretty precarious state. As Matthew Sweet said in a tweet on Duncan’s article, ‘Literature isn’t lovely stuff. It’s unsettling, painful, shapes your morals, shows you the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. It asks us questions whose answers aren’t immediately apparent, and confronts us with issues that we need to argue against.

None of this, of course, precludes it from leading to a career. My Twitter timeline is full of people giving examples of what their English, arts and humanities degrees have enabled them to do. In his book, Eaglestone quotes Cathy Davidson’s The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. Davidson cites Project Oxygen, launched by Google in 2013, which aimed to identify ‘the qualities that lead to promotion and a successful career’. The top skills for success identified by Project Oxygen included empathy, critical thinking, communicating and listening effectively, and possessing insights into others, including their different values and points of view. Google also stated that its most effective teams were not necessarily those with the highest levels of technical skill, but those whose members displayed empathy and emotional intelligence. Another significant piece of research – the British Academy’s Qualified for the Future, published in 2020 – pointed out that eight of the ten fastest-growing sectors of the UK economy employ more graduates from arts, humanities and social science subjects than from STEM disciplines. It also underlined the crucial role played by the arts and humanities in ‘developing active citizens who can think for themselves and hold authority to account.’

In my more cynical and embittered moments, I think that maybe, just maybe, this holding-to-account is exactly what our current government wants to discourage. I had a long dark night of the soul after last year’s GCSE results when I reasoned that Michael Gove’s 2017 reforms were part of a long-term plan to destroy the subject of English altogether. Make English so dull and unrewarding that nobody wants to do it at A level, run a concerted campaign to undermine the importance of the arts and humanities at degree level, and sit back and rejoice as everyone troops off to do STEM subjects or degree apprenticeships. Schools will still need English teachers, and that problem doesn’t seem to have been addressed, but I’m sure there could be ways round it. (It was a very dark night.)

This needs not to happen. I think of my Year Eights, exploring presentations of Caliban and making connections with the history of colonialism and the dehumanisation of enslaved people; my Year Sevens, learning about displacement and human rights through their work on The Bone Sparrow. I think of the work that I did with Year Ten on toxic masculinity and Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’. I think of my A level English Language group, examining media stereotypes of regional language varieties, and of my A level English Literature students, questioning and challenging representations in texts and gaining so many insights into themselves in the process. I think of all the rich and powerful learning that goes on in English classrooms up and down the country, much of it the kind of learning that could never be measured by any formal metric, but all of it vitally important for the health of our country. I think of the young people who will be inspired to want to do English at university, just as I was, not because it will necessarily lead to a lucrative career but simply because they love it. And I think of myself, at seventeen, and of how bored I’d have been if I’d been persuaded that a degree apprenticeship was a more viable and sensible alternative to studying English, because if degree apprenticeships had existed back then, you can bet your life that I – a kid from a Merseyside comprehensive school, from a family where nobody had ever been to university – would have been steered towards one. This is why English matters, and this is why we must fight for it.

I’m angry at the moment. I’m having a lovely weekend, on the whole, but I’m angry. There’s a lot to be angry about in education at the moment, let’s face it, but the thing that has specifically riled me today is the article published in yesterday’s TES about the schools visited by current and former education ministers since January 2022. It chimes in with various thoughts rattling round my head at the moment about teaching in a rural area, issues of rural deprivation and lack of opportunities, and how spectacularly unbothered our current government seems to be about schools in huge swathes of the country. So let’s have a look.

Callum Mason’s article points out, amongst other things, that the politicians concerned – the four different education secretaries we’ve had since then, plus three different ministers – were more likely to have visited a school in France or Spain than they were a school in the South-West of England. It’s true: the list of schools visited includes one in Paris, one in Valencia, and none at all in the South-West. But there are other omissions too. I was curious to see whether any schools in my own county, Lincolnshire, had been visited. Absolutely none. In fact, if you drill down beyond the broad geographical regions listed by the TES, you find some pretty striking facts. There were no visits at all to schools in the rural counties of Cumbria, Norfolk, Suffolk or Shropshire. No visits to any schools at all in some of England’s biggest cities: Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol, Bradford or Nottingham. No visits to Knowsley, where no A level provision has existed since 2017: if you live in Knowsley and you want to do A levels, you have to get on a bus and go elsewhere, with all the attendant worries that might bring. The only two visits that took place in the North-West were both to schools in Blackpool. In the East, two of the four schools visited were actually within the London commuter belt. Only three schools visited (the two schools in Blackpool and one school in Hastings) were in the top 20 most deprived areas in England. Most shamefully, only four of the 55 areas selected by the Government as Education Investment Areas were visited.

The issues facing young people growing up in areas of deprivation – especially rural deprivation – has been on my mind more than usual this week, as I’ve been reading Natasha Carthew’s brilliant, beautiful, angry book Undercurrent: A Cornish Memoir of Poverty, Nature and Resilience. Carthew writes powerfully of the many kinds of lack experienced by young people in rural communities, and it’s a list that all people involved in education should have at the forefront of their minds. The lack of opportunities. The lack of access to concerts, galleries, museums, theatres (which also becomes a lack of a sense of belonging in these spaces). The lack of public transport. The lack of support for marginalised groups. The lack of role models. The lack of anything to aspire to, because very few of the people you know have lives that are any different from your own. The lack of faith in any possibility of escape. It’s hard to get young people growing up in these circumstances to believe that achieving their GCSE target grades – those grades on which schools are judged, and that secondary school teachers up and down the country will be losing sleep over as we enter the last few weeks of exam preparation – has any kind of importance whatsoever.

My brain has a habit of making odd connections, and as I was reading Carthew’s memoir, I kept thinking back to the conversations I’ve been having with my Year Thirteen students about Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We’ve been looking at Tess not just as the victim of vile Alec and insufferable Angel, but also as a victim of circumstance: of having the misfortune to be born a girl, into a poor rural family, at a time when she has absolutely no means of escape. The odds are stacked against Tess from the start. And while we can think about Hardy’s concept of Fate, and of Tess’s lament about being born on a ‘blighted star’, we can also think of the many imbalances of power that make her story what it is: the story of a young woman stuck in the middle of nowhere, with limited opportunities to make decisions about her own life.

There is so much more that our government needs to offer to students in deprived areas, not the least of which is teachers who are valued, trusted, and paid appropriately. But they need to come and see us, to find out what we face.

One of the most important books in my life, for reasons far too complicated to go into, is David Lodge’s 1988 novel Nice Work. One of the main characters is a lecturer in nineteenth-century English literature called Robyn Penrose, who is working on a book about women in the nineteenth-century novel, called Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females. Work commitments being what they are, Robyn doesn’t get enough time to write. At one point in the novel, she finds herself in a hotel in Frankfurt: a luxurious space, geared entirely to the comfort of its guests. And she thinks, idly, if I had three weeks here, I could finish Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females.

I first read Nice Work when I was sixteen, and over the years, there have been times when I’ve been somewhere, and thought: if I had three weeks here, I could finish Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females. Well, obviously not Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females, but whatever it is I’ve been working on. I wrote a chunk of my PhD in an anonymous hotel in Lisbon where we went one very rainy Easter, and another chunk in a lovely café in the Oud St-Jan complex in Bruges, fortified by beer and coffee and apple cake. I wrote significant bits of the Book That Didn’t Find a Publisher in the John Rylands Library in Manchester, one of the loveliest places ever, and there are coffee shops all over the place where I’ve squirrelled myself away in corners to read, and think, and sometimes to write.

I am not writing Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females right now, but I am writing, one of the biggest and most exciting things I’ve worked on. We spent half-term in Oslo, in a beautiful apartment with a comfortable nook for writing, and if Oslo wasn’t so darned expensive I’d happily base myself there until this book is finished. The best place to write that I’ve found this year, though, has to be the Mareel Arts Centre in Lerwick, a light, airy space looking out onto the water, with fabulous coffee and a quiet gallery where people sat with laptops and did whatever they wanted to do.

It’s going to take me far longer than three weeks to finish my own Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females, whose title is still undecided. I’m trying to set aside one day every weekend for writing, but it’s hard. Work intrudes: we’ve just had a department review that’s taken up huge amounts of time and emotional energy, and there is always planning, and marking, and other stuff to do. It’s a balancing act.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the need for a room of one’s own: Cyril Connolly said that the pram in the hall was the enemy of good art, and Susan Bassnett described trying to work with the washing machine’s thrum in the background. Space, and time, and the chance to think: to not have to pack everything away at the end of a session of working, or get up to check what’s in the oven, or break off because there’s something that needs doing for tomorrow.

There are lots of us doing this. We carve out space and time; we lose ourselves in the lovely flow of words and ideas. It’s exhausting. But we do it. We write, to paraphrase Charles Hamilton Sorley, because we like it: we do not write for prize.

Big shout-out to all teachers who are writing. My blogging has been less frequent, of late, because of Domestic Angels and Unfortunate Females, but I am still here, and still thinking.

8 September 1997. It’s a Monday, the first Monday of term at the start of my second year as a qualified teacher. I have all the confidence and experience that comes from having spent one year in the job. I have my own classroom and I know how things work. I come home from school and sort out my planning for the rest of the week. I am twenty-four years old. I am meticulous and organised and in control. And just after half-past six, the phone rings. It’s my brother. He asks me if my partner, Matthew, is home from work yet. I want to know why. He says that he doesn’t want me to be on my own, that the reason why he’s calling – at an unexpected time, just after half-past six in the evening, on a Monday – is because our mum died, about two hours ago, completely unexpectedly.

She had been taken ill, apparently, at about midday. She’d managed to phone her friend down the road, but hadn’t been able to talk. Her friend had hurried round, but there had been no answer when she’d knocked on the door, and so she’d rung for an ambulance. My mum had had an aortic aneurysm, massive and unsurvivable. She’d been rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, but she’d died, seven weeks before her sixtieth birthday, at about four-thirty in the afternoon.

8 September 2022 was an odd day. Twenty-five years ago. Anniversaries are always hard, but this one was particularly tough, an official marker of half a lifetime without any parents. And so when I looked at the news on my phone at lunchtime, thinking of what would have been happening twenty-five years ago, and saw the announcement that the Queen’s doctors were concerned for her health, I kind of knew how it would all play out. And when the announcement came, at just after half-past six in the evening, I wasn’t surprised.

My mum was lovely. Kind and warm and quietly dignified. My dad had died just over three years earlier, and she was just getting things back together again. The last time I saw her was on the day Princess Diana died. We’d sat in the garden in the late summer sun, everything feeling a bit weird. I’d been planning to go up at half-term. Everything was knocked out of place, out of shape. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

A lot has been written about the way that private griefs are brought back into focus by the death of public figures, how collective mourning allows personal sorrow to resurface. There’s a sense of catharsis, a purging, a healing. There’s space to think.

My mum was a knitter, and one of the things I have from her is a cardigan that she made for me in my second year at university. I wear it when I’m cold, and sometimes the Dude wraps himself in it if he’s feeling sad, a hug from the grandmother he never knew, who never got to meet him.

I am thinking, tonight, of everyone who lost someone on 8 September. I am wishing them whatever strength they need to get themselves through what they’re going through at the moment. And I am hoping they have a cardigan to wrap themselves in.

I have become the custodian of our family photo album, the lever arch file of yellowing holiday snaps that my dad took in the early 1970s. There are pictures of me as a baby and in various stages of toddlerhood, and pictures of my brother and sisters in clothes they’d rather not remember: giant flares with patch pockets, orange nylon shirts, matching knitted cardigans and crocheted ponchos. It’s a delight, and I have – of course – made the Husband and the Dude sit through the whole lot, with an accompanying commentary.

Some of the photos are of the house that I grew up in, a 1920s semi that came with my dad’s job, as Safety Engineer for Parkside Colliery in Newton-le-Willows. He spent long periods of time on call in case of accidents, so a house near the colliery was a necessity. Parkside opened in 1957, and didn’t have the exposed winding gear that you’d normally associate with northern pit towns: instead, everything was enclosed within two enormous concrete buildings that reared up above the surrounding fields. They could have been office buildings, or strange, windowless blocks of flats. They were a soft beige colour that turned pale apricot in the sun. In rain, they darkened to dull purple, and then faded back to beige again as the water evaporated. When we went on holiday, they were the landmark we looked out for to tell us that we were almost home.

Most of our holidays were in Blackpool. Blackpool wasn’t our nearest seaside resort – that was Southport – but it was where we went, largely because my dad’s cousin owned a series of guesthouses up near the North Pier and allowed our family of six to have a cheapish week away every year. Later, we used to go to Blackpool twice a year, at Easter and then in November, for weekends organised by the National Coal Board. These were an odd combination of quizzes, team-building exercises and first-aid competitions that involved gruesome mock-ups of underground disasters. Each colliery sent a team to investigate, treat the casualties and show what safety procedures they’d implement. These competitions were fiercely contested, but often, it was the Parkside team, led by my dad, that won. In the evenings, there’d be a dinner dance at the Winter Gardens, a washed-up comedian, and – each November – a Coal Queens of Britain competition, where the daughters of various miners would parade in swimsuits and evening wear. This was in the late 70s, and nobody batted an eyelid at the miners’ daughters and tired old jokes. I don’t remember much about our summers at Aunty Lilian’s guesthouses, but I do remember the miners’ weekends, the donkey rides and trips to the Tower, and the unusually cold Easter when there was snow on Blackpool beach.

My brother and sisters and I went to Blackpool last weekend. It’s the first time since about 1977 that all four of us have been there together, and we wanted to find the guesthouses where we used to stay. The last time I went to Blackpool was in the summer of 1989, the day before the GCSE results came out. That was the summer I lost myself in the Brontës, and the garish lights and sounds, the smells of candyfloss and fish and chips, clashed with the thoughts in my head about the Yorkshire moors and escaping to somewhere where I could hide in a library for three years and read.

The lights and sounds and smells are still exactly the same, but the way to approach Blackpool is to take it on its own terms. It was a beautiful day, with wide blue skies and the sun glinting off the sea, and we had a fabulous time finding the spots that we’d been photographed in so many years ago.

Simon Armitage has been on Radio 4 recently, exploring ten of Philip Larkin’s poems to mark the centenary of the poet’s birth, and one of the poems he chose was ‘To the Sea’, published in Larkin’s final collection, High Windows. It describes ‘the miniature gaiety of seasides’, and it marks a rare note of positivity for Larkin, as the people he describes aren’t being sneered at for their tawdriness but celebrated for taking part in what is ‘half an annual pleasure, half a rite’. The people on the beach are all happily coexisting, doing their own thing: families playing games and making sandcastles, elderly people in wheelchairs being taken for a day out, swimmers gasping at the cold, and Larkin himself as a child, ‘happy at being on my own’. There’s a beautiful description of toddlers ‘grasping at enormous air’ (and what else do children do, when they’re learning to walk?) At the end, there’s a typically Larkinesque nod to human imperfection, but also a sense that for all their shortcomings, the people he describes are doing something important, something that absolves them of anything else:

If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

‘Teaching their children by a sort of clowning’: isn’t that gorgeous? And look at the rhymes, too: they’re there, not shoving themselves in your face, but just gently, under the surface, holding things together like the informal rituals they describe.

I’d like to think ‘To the Sea’ was about Blackpool, but apparently it’s about Rhyl, on the North Wales coast, where Larkin’s parents met. We had an annual trip to Rhyl when I was in secondary school, to the Sun Centre. I remember shingle and grey skies. I think we were sold Rhyl on the grounds that it was in another country, and was therefore exotic. It seems an appropriate place for Sidney and Eva to have had their first encounter, somehow.

Well. I started planning this post a fortnight ago, when Nadhim Zahawi made his statement that removing the works of Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen from the curriculum was an act of ‘cultural vandalism’. But then life got in the way, in the form of a weekend away with our Gold DofE expedition and various other things, and it’s only now that I’ve had time to actually write it. And after one of the most turbulent weeks in politics I’ve ever seen, Nadhim Zahawi is now two whole Education Secretaries ago, and it all seems like yesterday’s news. I’m playing serious catch-up.

Actually, though, coming back to things after the event is entirely in the spirit of what I’m going to say here, so that’s okay. What I want to do is to look at the writers we study and the way they influence us – which is not necessarily in the way Nadhim Zahawi might think.

Let’s deal, first of all, with that issue of ‘the curriculum.’ As many people have pointed out, Owen and Larkin haven’t been removed from the curriculum at all. What’s happened is that OCR has removed one poem by Wilfred Owen (‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’) and one poem by Philip Larkin (‘An Arundel Tomb’) from the poetry anthology that students study for its GCSE English Literature specification. But an exam specification and ‘the curriculum’ are not the same thing. Each individual school is free to develop its own curriculum, and therefore to teach as much Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin as they like. Schools following the OCR specification can still use these two poems (and really, teaching one poem by each poet is hardly the same as ‘studying Owen’ and ‘studying Larkin’). You’d have hoped that Nadhim Zahawi would have known the difference, being Secretary of State for Education and all, but why let reality get in the way of an attention-grabbing headline? Maybe James Cleverly will grasp which is which: Michelle Donelan didn’t really have time.

All this is by the by, though, because the main thing I want to do is to look at the idea of literary study that underpins Zahawi’s comments. It’s one that’s influenced heavily by Matthew Arnold’s view of literature as ‘the best that has been thought and said’, something to be handed down from one generation to the next. It’s a bucket-filling model that casts students as passive recipients of the glories of the past. And it’s one that contains all manner of problems, many of which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever grappled with the basics of literary theory or tried to construct an English curriculum. Who decides what is ‘the best’ and what isn’t? How are new texts admitted to this sacred canon? How do we balance the important texts of the past with those that are fresh and urgent, that represent a more diverse and plural world? Creating a curriculum that is genuinely varied, that allows space for a range of voices, is a complex job.

Let’s not forget, either, that the most important voices in there belong to the students. Because even when you’ve decided on your perfect curriculum – diverse, challenging and thoughtfully-driven – you should be very wary of treating the texts within it as objects of reverence. Texts are not there simply to be admired. They can be, yes – but they should also be questioned and argued with. They should spark conversations and our teaching should allow space for this. Sometimes, those conversations will last the length of a unit of work. Sometimes, they’ll stretch over years.

It’s fitting that Zahawi should have mentioned Larkin, as he’s a writer I first encountered when I was at school, studying The Whitsun Weddings for A level English Literature, and I’ve been having a conversation with his work ever since. Larkin’s poetry had a huge impact on me as a teenager. This was partly because the places he wrote about – the ordinary towns with their large cool stores and mortgaged half-built edges – were very much like the place where I grew up. It was also because of his poetry’s obsession with elsewhere, anywhere, as long as it wasn’t wherever you actually happened to be, which appealed to me as a restless seventeen-year-old. And it was because of the way he played with language, hyphenating and compounding, starting with the concrete and moving to the abstract. There was a sense of words being carefully chosen, being weighed for their effect. Some of his descriptions still shape the way I see the world: vast Sunday-full and organ-frowned-on spaces; piled gold clouds and shining gull-marked mud; smells of different dinners; an enormous yes. I can’t go to London on the train without thinking of the city’s postal districts packed like squares of wheat, and I’ve spent a lot of time, in my part of the world, looking for places where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. (Confession: I even went up to Hull for the Larkin 25 celebrations back in 2010, to visit the giant fibreglass toads that took over the city, and to see exhibits that included Larkin’s enormous slippers, his saucer-souvenir, and the actual lawnmower that features in ‘The Mower’, complete with an artfully-poised fluffy hedgehog. I am a literary nerd.)

But this isn’t the only Larkin, and as most people will know, the man himself was neither admirable nor wholesome. Many of his views were deeply unpleasant, and you don’t need to dig too far to find them out: the racism, the sexism, the Thatcher-worship. And you can’t teach Larkin – you shouldn’t teach Larkin – without addressing this. His work opens up questions about whether a person’s writing can ever be separated from their life, whether the unsavouriness of the man undermines the brilliance of some of his poetry. This is an important question for teenagers to consider. What kinds of awfulness are we prepared to excuse? How much leeway do we allow?

My Year Twelves explore a range of Larkin’s poems as part of their work on the AQA Theory and Independence unit, which involves looking at texts from a range of critical perspectives. We examine four poems through a feminist lens, looking at the male gaze, the representation of women and the narrative personae in ‘Wild Oats’, ‘Self’s the Man’, ‘Afternoons’ and ‘Broadcast’. We discuss Larkin’s own tangled relationships with women, which gives us the chance to talk about the place of biographical knowledge in the study of literature, and consider the different attitudes conveyed in these poems. We think about whether an unmarried childless man could ever understand what it is like to be a young mother like the women in ‘Afternoons’, and I talk about the different reactions I have had to that particular poem since I first read it at seventeen: first shuddering at the idea of a life bound by domesticity, then indignant that Larkin was undervaluing women’s experiences, then – as a mother myself, pushing my son on the swings in an appropriately Larkinesque playground that was bound on three sides by graveyards – finding his description all too resonant. We question and pick apart, and I remind them that no interpretation can ever encompass everything, that no reading can be the final one.

And so, nearly three weeks after Zahawi bemoaned the removal of Larkin from one particular exam specification, I’m going back to his words, and picking them up, and feeding them into a discussion I’ve been having with Larkin’s work for over thirty years now. Because studying literature isn’t about passing on ‘the best’. It recognises that texts can be contested, no matter how great they may once have been held to be. It gets young people to think. Above all, it opens up a conversation, and hopes that that conversation runs and runs, looping backwards and forwards, long after the last exam has been sat.