A Poet Emerges

45 3. A Poet Emerges Harold Owen, JOURNEY FROM OBSCURITY. WILFRED OWEN 1893 - 1918. I. CHILDHOOD. Lond: Oxford UP, I9B3 3O/ —. The first volume of JOURNEY FROM OBSCURTIY is mainly autobiographical: in it Mr. Harold Owen gives an evocative but unromantic picture of his childhood in a slum district of Birkenhead and later in a poor but slightly better district of Shrewsbury. At the same time a great deal of light is thrown upon the boyhood and adolescence of his brother, Wilfred Owen. Clearly the original raison d'être for the publication of the "Memoirs of the Owen Family" (the book's sub-title) is that it provides a backcloth for the study of the poet; this volume has achieved much more: it is the study of a family, of an environment and of a period of time before and after the turn of the century. The book is not in any ordinary sense a social study, for it is entirely subjective, being the memoirs of a gifted painter who was once a small boy living in the midst of the incidents he recounts. He was, in his own words, "not really a very satisfactory sort of child" (p. 24) and it is from this position of advantage or disadvantage that he looks back upon his family life during his childhood. It is through his eyes that the houses and streets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury are seen, and the inhabitants of these places are given colour by his feelings towards them and about them; to him the board schools which he attended were places of misery and degradation and he describes them as such. Pre-1914 England has frequently been regarded as a time of security and contentment; Mr. Owen's memoirs help to redress the balance, for he makes it clear that it was a rough and hard life for those who lived at or below subsistence level. To get enough to eat, to be reasonably well-dressed, to wring some sort of wretched education out of the state system was the principal struggle »f many families like the Owens; little wonder that others "neither troubled nor cared about seeing that their unwanted children were kept clean either in mind, habits, or bodies, so that the children were not just healthily grubby but visibly unclean, always scabrous and dirty." (p. 180) We are not, however, left with a picture of unrelieved misery. Mr. Owen has delightful and nostalgic memories of holidays, of family excursions, of leisurely days walking and painting in the area around Shrewsbury. He makes it clear too that a sound education could be obtained at not too great an expense, for despite the precarious financial position of the Owen family, Wilfred was well-educated, In considering VJi1fred and his family we return to what is central in the book. "The incidents of my childhood and boyhood are not in themselves of any importance " writes Mr. Owen, "except for the effect and reflection they had upon Wilfred." (p. 23) It is indeed surprising that so little has been known until now of one of the great English poets of this century. Reading these memoirs we begin to realize why this has been so. Sensitive and intelligent, the Owen family were unfitted by upbringing and by inclination to live in a slum or a near-slum area. This tended to isolate them from their neighbours and to leave them with few close associates. No one but a member of the immediate family could hope to have enough insight into Wilfred's early life to write an intimate biography, and th¡s work by his brother has been a long time in gestation. 46 From VJi Ifred's published letters we had already observed his extreme closeness to his mother. We had sensed, too, mainly from negative information, a certain antagonism between Wilfred and his father. Harold Owen's book helps to put these two relationships in their right perspective, for Mrs. Owen's devotion to, and reliance upon, her oldest son appear to have estranged him to some extent from his brothers and sister, giving him a responsibility and maturity above his years, denying him "if not his...