Spectator competition winners: If Alan Bennett had been a spy

In Competition No. 3247, you were asked to submit the reflections of a well-known writer on a career path they might have taken.

Most famous writers have had day jobs – Kurt Vonnegut sold Saabs, Harper Lee worked as an airline ticket agent, and Joseph Heller was a blacksmith’s apprentice.

But what about those missed vocations? Take a bow, Robert Frost, map-maker; Emily Dickinson, undertaker; Raymond Chandler, shrink. The winners earn £25.

I think I could have been a model censor of obscenity Admonishing the naughty and not ever granting lenity To crudity or nudity or any kind of rudery, Far bossier than Bowdler in my monumental prudery. How drastically I’d prune the books that might disturb or vex you all By dabbling in language that’s suggestive of the sexual, For such things could disturb you and you might well find it troubling If wickedness were hinted and entendres started doubling.   Then should I maybe exercise the censor’s own prerogative Of pondering naughty pictures with a gaze that’s interrogative, And if I kept a few that were delectably collectable, Well, who’d impugn the motives of a censor so respectable? George Simmers/W.S. Gilbert

I think that I shall never write Some poetry that is not trite. I aim for depth, but what I get Is often barely worth the sweat. I have personified a tree, To wide approval. Lucky me. Yet might this versifying hack Have been a virile lumberjack? My avocation is to be In profitable industry, In heavy work with firs and pines, Not dribbling out the rhyming lines. I’d follow in Paul Bunyan’s tracks, Wielding the chainsaw and the axe. Poems are made by wimps like me, But lumberjacks can fell a tree. Basil Ransome-Davies/Joyce Kilmer

Mam pooh-poohed the idea, adamant eavesdroppers never heard good of themselves, but I always hankered after a career in espionage. Had she known I intended to spy for the Soviets, there’d have been a to-do. Naturally reticent, I simply waited to be contacted, signalling readiness by sitting in tea rooms looking pensive.