ABSTRACT
Had he lived, Philip Larkin would have been invited to contribute to this volume. To conjecture about the essay he would have written in affection for Jack Simmons (with whom he worked at Leicester University, then a University College, from 1946 to 1950) is a wistful pleasure, for so many aspects of Larkin’s personality would surely have vivified it: the wide range of reading, the enjoyment of the Englishness of railway travel, the love of the everyday, the sheep and fields and hedgerows and Odeons and level crossings and cricket matches, the railway stations with their crackling announcements in received pronunciation, and possibly also a nostalgia for the times when lunch and dinner were announced by a steward passing along the train. There might also be, however, that Larkinian waspishness towards train travel in the 1980s and after, with soccer-shirted children and adults, mobile phones, and Sony Walkmans, and dry, air-conditioned air and windows that do not open, all of which Larkin would have abominated and which his death in 1985 spared him. And, beyond all these, informing a voice which is conservative in tone yet universal in its appeal, would be Larkin’s own lifetime of rail travel.
