Walking with the Ancestors - Philip Larkin

Arrival

Larkin was prompted to apply for the job he later described as seeming 'to have determined the course of my life' after receiving a request for information from the Ministry of Labour in the autumn of 1943 as to his future plans. The young novelist, who was living at home with his parents in Warwick after graduating from university, had been declared unfit for military service and, in his own words, 'rightly judged the inquiry to be a warning that I had better start doing something'! That something arrived in the shape of a job advertisement in the Birmingham Post for a Librarian to Wellington Urban District Council. With a starting salary of £175 p/a (plus 'cost of living' bonus!) Larkin's motives for taking the job hardly appear to have been financial and the close proximity of the town to Shrewsbury, where his college friend and fellow novelist Bruce Montgomery (better known as the author Edmund Crispin) held a teaching job, seems to have been an equally important consideration in applying for a position for which he was essentially untrained.