Born in London, the first of nine children of an eccentric schoolmaster, Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) grew up in a village in Kent. He spent most of his life in the countryside, indulging his passion for fishing, cricket, and church music, and feeding bacon to the rats he felt were related to his verminous comrades in the trenches of the Great War. Short, sensitive, and shy, he was a charming and generous birdlike man who enjoyed a wide circle of friends and many devoted pupils in England and the Orient. Blunden suffered four tragic blows. Two years on the firing-line (longer than any other war writer) remained a lifelong nightmare and at times transformed his beloved nature into a Poe-like threat:
Oaks, once my friends, with ugly murmurings
Madden me, and ivy whirs like condor wings:
The very bat that stoops and whips askance
Shrills malice at the soul grown strange in France.
The cruel death from contaminated milk of his first child, aged five weeks, left a permanent scar and led him to father six more children in an attempt to replace her. His first marriage, to Mary Daines, the simple daughter of a village blacksmith, broke up in 1927 when he returned from three years in Japan to discover she was in love with a younger man. And his second marriage, to the intellectual Sylva Norman, who disliked sex and refused to have children, finally collapsed, after eleven years and many separations, in 1944. Yet as
