Summer Poppleton

‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, wrote Philip Larkin, at the end of ‘I Remember, I Remember’, a poem about finding himself passing through Coventry, his childhood hometown. Larkin’s speaker ‘leant far out, and squinnied for a sign / That this was still the town that had been “mine” / So long’, but he doesn’t find one. Typically glum Larkin, you might think, and maybe so – but Larkin left for university in 1940, shortly before much of Coventry was turned to rubble and then to concrete, and (like Coventry itself, perhaps) he never really came back, so maybe that is why he didn’t recognise it. No bombs dropped on the leafy village of Dunston, where I went to primary school, excepting occasional social, metaphorical bombs. In the poem ‘Zeps’, written from the home front of the Great War, the dialect poet Bernard Gilbert, from nearby Billinghay, has a wife complaining that her husband shouldn’t ‘mek sich a bloor’ about ‘them Zeps passin’ over; / Them Jarmins!’, and them Jarmins in newer flying machines did nothing more to Dunston than pass over it in the Second World War either.

Nonetheless, war changed Dunston. My mother, who grew up here, remembers the cockney former land girl who had married a local dairy farmer and who delivered the milk in big churns. She stood out, but ‘not that much’. A secret giant beech on a country lane nearby – less than six miles from what were the Second World War air bases of RAF Metheringham, RAF Coleby Grange, RAF Waddington, RAF Wellingore, RAF Digby – is wounded and ...