They tuck you up

I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You know the one: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do…’

I was working as a volunteer in a care home for physically handicapped adults in Camden, north London. I had dropped out of school without doing my A levels. When I visited my parents over Easter, my father was angry about my newly acquired pierced ear and earrings: ‘What does it say about who you’re associating with? You’ve really upset your mother.’

Seething, I returned to London and conveyed to the very camp head of the care home — who had been instrumental in the acquiring of said earrings — my misfortune at having such narrow-minded parents. The next day, there was Larkin’s High Windows collection on my bed, with a bookmark tucked into ‘This Be the Verse’ — written in April 1971. It summed up everything I felt about my parents and the family in general. In those days ‘fuck’ was a shocking swear word. It was the first time I had seen it in print. It was delicious seeing it on the page, bold as brass, right next to the hated words ‘mum and dad’.

I read it over and over. I learned it by heart. It became the party piece that I brought out on every possible occasion to impress the girls. Which it duly did. And so it framed my late teenage years.

The problem, though, was that Larkin,  and writers and artists like him, helped to mould the society which emerged out of the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of shrugging it off for what it should have been — a teenage rebellion poem — society has embraced it and all it says about family life.