English Literature

Part I: British Literature

Chapter V: The Mid-20th Century

5.1 Literary History: The Mid-Twentieth Century

The period of high modernism was partly followed be a return to more realistic modes
of writing in the 1930s although many writers maintained modernist sensibilities.
Working-class author Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933) deals with
the effects of unemployment on young people and became very successful, influencing
the British public’s thinking about unemployment at the time. Some middle-class writers
took up socialist ideas as the answer to the problems of modern society. With Brave
New World (1932), Aldous Huxley wrote the first negative utopian novel, that is, a
dystopia, against the barbarity of modern mass society and manipulation. Despite his
middle-class background, George Orwell wanted to share the experiences of the
working classes, worked and associated with poor and unemployed people and wrote
about their lives, for example in Road to Wigan Pier (1937) about the hard lives of
miners. Like many socialists, he felt the moral duty to fight in the Spanish Civil War,
but he became disillusioned and frustrated by the reality of communism, which he
satirises in Animal Farm (1945). His most successful book is the dystopian novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) about large-scale manipulation and surveillance in a future
world. Jean Rhys, a writer born in the Caribbean and living between London, Paris and
Vienna had published a number of novels and stories since the 1920s, reflecting her
cosmopolitan life, but Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), set partly in the Caribbean, finally
made her popular.
From the Second World War, Britain emerged victorious as a partner in the Allied
Forces, but the country was exhausted and struggling to rebuild. After their contribution
to the war effort, the working classes were granted better social services through the
establishment of the British Welfare State. The standard of living rose and consumerism
started developing, but society remained quite traditional. This changed with the social
movements of the 1960s when the second women’s movement demanded full equality,
left-wing groups became influential, people demonstrated against the American war in

1
Vietnam and for nuclear disarmament, and popular music grew to be a major factor in
the cultural economy. The 1970s were less optimistic because of stagnation in society,
and the 1980s brought a return to conservative politics with Margaret Thatcher.
The decline of the British Empire started in 1947 with the independence of India and
with the British withdrawal from Hong Kong ended in 1997. The need for workers in
the post-war period led to the immigration of many people from India, Pakistan and the
former British colonies in the Caribbean and other parts of the world from 1948
onwards. The rise of multicultural, multi-ethnic Britain began. At the beginning,
immigrants faced discrimination and exclusion, and already in the 1950s, they started
writing about their disillusionment as, for example, George Lamming did in The
Emigrants (1954). From the 1970s, they developed into a strong factor in British culture,
including British literature.
The immediate post-war literature saw writers that looked, after the horrors of the
Second World War, quite pessimistic into the future (see above Huxley and Orwell),
and spy novels and thrillers expressed the anxieties of the Cold War period, which can
be found, for example, in the novels by Graham Greene. From the 1950s onwards, a
generation of younger writers became more rebellious. The group of playwrights and
novelists known as ‘the Angry Young Men’ included John Osborne, whose play Look
Back in Anger (1956) inspired the group’s name, Alan Sillitoe and others. Their works
are set in ordinary settings and their protagonists rebel against the hypocrisy of
bourgeois British life. At the time, such realistic plays about the situation of the working
and lower middle classes were new in British theatre.
A great variety of writers and styles emerged in the field of poetry. Philip Larkin was a
member of a group known as ‘the Movement’, and their anthology New Lines (1956)
showed a return to simple forms of expression. A more intellectual approach was taken
by Ted Hughes and other poets of ‘the Group’ whose A Group Anthology appeared in
1963. There were also regional poets such as Irish writer Seamus Heaney (Death of a
Naturalist, 1966) and Scottish poet Douglas Dunn (Terry Street, 1969), whose early
poems evoke working-class life.
The 1950s also gave rise to female writers like Muriel Spark, Angela Carter and Doris
Lessing. Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1963) is a complex exploration of gender and

2
sexuality from a female perspective while the novel In Pursuit of the English (1960)
questions the colonial myths of Englishness and contrasts them by the grim realities of
post-war Britain.
Comprehension questions
1. Which problem of modern capitalism do dystopian novels such as Huxley’s
Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 address?
2. What characterises British theatre in the 1950s and 1960s?
3. Describe the new development in British society that is reflected in George
Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954).

5.2 Doris Lessing, To Room 19 (1963)

1. Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013): The author and her literary career
Doris Lessing was born in Persia (now Iran) but in 1924, her family moved to a farm in
the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in Africa. Her formal
education ended when she was 13, but she pursued her literary and political interests
and made herself into a self-educated intellectual. She left home at 15 to work, and at
19 she married and had two children. A few years later, she left her family, then
remarried and had one son, with whom she left for London in 1949. There, after the
publication of her first book, she became a professional writer.
The colonial and post-colonial situation in southern Africa are a major theme in her early
works. In her first published book, The Grass Is Singing (1950), she wrote about a white
farmer in Rhodesia, and in Going Home (1957), she described her feelings about
Rhodesia on a return visit. Her five-novel series Children of Violence (1952 – 1969)
centres on a woman who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. The
recurring themes of her work are the clash of cultures, the injustices of racial inequality
and the conflict between the individual conscience and the collective good. In her early
stories set in Africa, she criticised the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials
and exposed the sterility of the white culture in Africa. In response to her criticism, she
was declared a prohibited alien in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa in 1956.

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In one of her most complex novels, The Golden Notebook (1962), Lessing describes
how a female writer tries to come to terms with her times through her art. It is a narrative
experiment describing the multiple selves of the heroine. With her writing, she fed into
the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but she herself denied that she was a
feminist. Lessing was also a master of the short story and published several collections
of short stories, starting with A Man and Two Women in 1963.
In her later works, Lessing experimented with new forms of the novel, writing, for
example, ‘inner space fictions’ like Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), but beside more
novels, she also wrote plays, a graphic novel and the libretto for an opera. In 2007, aged
88, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

2. Summary of the text

Susan and Matthew Rawlings marry in their late twenties and raise four children. When
the youngest children go off to school Susan, who quit her job to be a full-time mother,
does not experience the sense of freedom that she expected. She feels simultaneously as
if she has nothing to do worth doing and never has a spare moment to herself. Her day
is taken up in waiting for the children to come home, consulting with the charwoman or
worrying about dinner. She becomes anxious and distant, pulling away from her
husband, who begins to have affairs. The establishment of a ‘Mother’s Room’ at the top
of their house does not give her any real privacy.
Finally, in order to get some time alone, she rents a hotel room every afternoon where
she just sits and thinks. Her husband assumes she is having an affair and has a detective
track her down. Knowing that his rational world will not recognise her "irrational"
feelings Susan lies to him by saying she were indeed having an affair. The next day, she
returns to the hotel room and kills herself.

Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen (1963)

This is a story, I suppose, about a failure in intelligence: the Rawlings’ marriage was
grounded in intelligence.

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They were older when they married than most of their married friends: in their well-
seasoned late twenties. Both had had a number of affairs, sweet rather than bitter; and
when they fell in love—for they did fall in love—had known each other for some time.
They joked that they had saved each other “for the real thing.” That they had waited so
long (but not too long) for this real thing was to them a proof of their sensible
discrimination1. A good many of their friends had married young, and now (they felt)
probably regretted lost opportunities; while others, still unmarried, seemed to them arid,
self-doubting, and likely to make desperate or romantic marriages.
Not only they, but others, felt they were well-matched: their friends’ delight was an
additional proof of their happiness. They had played the same roles, male and female,
in this group or set, if such a wide, loosely connected, constantly changing constellation
of people could be called a set. They had both become, by virtue of their moderation,
their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others came
for advice. They could be, and were, relied on. It was one of those cases of a man and a
woman linking themselves whom no one else had ever thought of linking, probably
because of their similarities. But then everyone exclaimed: Of course! How right! How
was it we never thought of it before!
And so they married amid general rejoicing, and because of their foresight and their
sense for what was probable, nothing was a surprise to them.
Both had well-paid jobs. Matthew was a subeditor2 on a large London newspaper, and
Susan worked in an advertising firm. He was not the stuff of which editors or publicised
journalists are made, but he was much more than “a subeditor,” being one of the essential
background people who in fact steady, inspire and make possible the people in the
limelight. He was content with this position. Susan had a talent for commercial drawing.
She was humorous about the advertisements she was responsible for, but she did not
feel strongly about them one way or the other.
Both, before they married, had had pleasant flats, but they felt it unwise to base a
marriage on either flat, because it might seem like a submission of personality on the
part of the one whose flat it was not. They moved into a new flat in South Kensington3

1
The ability to see the difference between two things or people.
2
A person who checks and changes texts, especially for a newspaper.
3
One of the richest parts of London with luxury living and many cultural attractions.
5
on the clear understanding that when their marriage had settled down (a process they
knew would not take long, and was in fact more a humorous concession to popular
wisdom than what was due to themselves) they would buy a house and start a family.
And this is what happened. They lived in their charming flat for two years, giving parties
and going to them, being a popular young married couple, and then Susan became
pregnant, she gave up her job, and they bought a house in Richmond4. It was typical of
this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter.
Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose.
But people did feel these two had chosen; this balanced and sensible family was no more
than what was due to them because of their infallible sense for choosing right.
And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in Richmond and were
happy. They had everything they had wanted and had planned for.
And yet …
Well, even this was expected, that there must be a certain flatness.…
Yes, yes, of course, it was natural they sometimes felt like this. Like what?
Their life seemed to be like a snake5 biting its tail. Matthew’s job for the sake of Susan,
children, house, and garden—which caravanserai6 needed a well-paid job to maintain it.
And Susan’s practical intelligence for the sake of Matthew, the children, the house and
the garden—which unit would have collapsed in a week without her.
But there was no point about which either could say: “For the sake of this is all the rest.”
Children? But children can’t be a centre of life and a reason for being. They can be a
thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a wellspring
to live from. Or they shouldn’t be. Susan and Matthew knew that well enough.
Matthew’s job? Ridiculous. It was an interesting job, but scarcely a reason for living.
Matthew took pride in doing it well, but he could hardly be expected to be proud of the
newspaper; the newspaper he read, his newspaper, was not the one he worked for.
Their love for each other? Well, that was nearest it. If this wasn’t a centre, what was?
Yes, it was around this point, their love, that the whole extraordinary structure revolved.
For extraordinary it certainly was. Both Susan and Matthew had moments of thinking

4
A prosperous and beautiful part of London.
5
Long reptile.
6
Guest house and market place on a route for caravans, that is, for groups travelling together through a desert.
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so, of looking in secret disbelief at this thing they had created: marriage, four children,
big house, garden, charwomen7, friends, cars … and this thing, this entity, all of it had
come into existence, been blown into being out of nowhere, because Susan loved
Matthew and Matthew loved Susan. Extraordinary. So that was the central point, the
wellspring.
And if one felt that it simply was not strong enough, important enough, to support it all,
well whose fault was that? Certainly neither Susan’s nor Matthew’s. It was in the nature
of things. And they sensibly blamed neither themselves nor each other.
On the contrary, they used their intelligence to preserve what they had created from a
painful and explosive world: they looked around them, and took lessons. All around
them, marriages collapsing, or breaking, or rubbing along (even worse, they felt). They
must not make the same mistakes, they must not.

[…]

[…] when the children went back to school, she sat on a white stone near the flowing
river, and she thought: It is not even a year since the twins went to school, since they
were off my hands (What on earth did I think I meant when I used that stupid phrase?),
and yet I’m a different person. I’m simply not myself. I don’t understand it.
Yet she had to understand it. For she knew that this structure—big white house, on which
the mortgage8 still cost four hundred a year, a husband, so good and kind and insightful;
four children, all doing so nicely; and the garden where she sat; and Mrs. Parkes, the
cleaning woman—all this depended on her, and yet she could not understand why, or
even what it was she contributed to it.
She said to Matthew in their bedroom: “I think there must be something wrong with
me.”
And he said: “Surely not, Susan? You look marvellous—you’re as lovely as ever.”

7
Cleaning woman.
8
Money borrowed from a bank to buy a house.
7
She looked at the handsome blond man, with his clear, intelligent, blue-eyed face, and
thought: Why is it I can’t tell him? Why not? And she said: “I need to be alone more
than I am.”
At which he swung his slow blue gaze at her, and she saw what she had been dreading:
Incredulity9. Disbelief. And fear. An incredulous blue stare from a stranger who was her
husband, as close to her as her own breath.
He said: “But the children are at school and off your hands.”
She said to herself: I’ve got to force myself to say: Yes, but do you realize that I never
feel free? There’s never a moment I can say to myself: There’s nothing I have to remind
myself about, nothing I have to do in half an hour, or an hour, or two hours.…
But she said: “I don’t feel well.”
He said: “Perhaps you need a holiday.”
She said, appalled10: “But not without you, surely?” For she could not imagine herself
going off without him. Yet that was what he meant. Seeing her face, he laughed, and
opened his arms, and she went into them, thinking: Yes, yes, but why can’t I say it? And
what is it I have to say?
She tried to tell him, about never being free. And he listened and said: “But Susan, what
sort of freedom can you possibly want—short of being dead! Am I ever free? I go to the
office, and I have to be there at ten—all right, half past ten, sometimes. And I have to
do this or that, don’t I? Then I’ve got to come home at a certain time—I don’t mean it,
you know I don’t—but if I’m not going to be back home at six I telephone you. When
can I ever say to myself: I have nothing to be responsible for in the next six hours?”
Susan, hearing this, was remorseful11. Because it was true. The good marriage, the
house, the children, depended just as much on his voluntary bondage12 as it did on hers.
But why did he not feel bound? Why didn’t he chafe and become restless? No, there was
something really wrong with her and this proved it.

9
Feeling shocked.
10
Very bad.
11
Be sorry.
12
The state of being other persons’ slave, having to work for them.
8
And that word “bondage”—why had she used it? She had never felt marriage, or the
children, as bondage. Neither had he, or surely they wouldn’t be together lying in each
other’s arms content after twelve years of marriage.
No, her state (whatever it was) was irrelevant, nothing to do with her real good life with
her family. She had to accept the fact that, after all, she was an irrational person and to
live with it. Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers13, or being deaf.
She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.
Nevertheless, as a result of this conversation with her husband, there was a new regime14
next holidays.
The spare room at the top of the house now had a cardboard sign saying: PRIVATE!15
DO NOT DISTURB! on it. (This sign had been drawn in coloured chalks by the
children, after a discussion between the parents in which it was decided this was
psychologically the right thing.) The family and Mrs. Parkes knew this was “Mother’s
Room” and that she was entitled to her privacy. Many serious conversations took place
between Matthew and the children about not taking Mother for granted16. Susan
overheard the first, between father and Harry, the older boy, and was surprised at her
irritation17 over it. Surely she could have a room somewhere in that big house and retire
into it without such a fuss being made? Without it being so solemnly discussed? Why
couldn’t she simply have announced: “I’m going to fit out the little top room for myself,
and when I’m in it I’m not to be disturbed for anything short of fire”? Just that, and
finished; instead of long earnest discussions. When she heard Harry and Matthew
explaining it to the twins with Mrs. Parkes coming in—“Yes, well, a family sometimes
gets on top of a woman”—she had to go right away to the bottom of the garden until the
devils of exasperation18 had finished their dance in her blood.
But now there was a room, and she could go there when she liked, she used it seldom:
she felt even more caged19 there than in her bedroom. […] What it amounted to was that
Mother’s Room, and her need for privacy, had become a valuable lesson in respect for

13
Speaking with unusual pauses.
14
A particular way of organising a household or other system.
15
Only for one person and not for everyone.
16
Believing without thinking that something will always be available and stay the same..
17
The feeling of being angry.
18
The feeling of being annoyed, especially because you cannot solve a problem.
19
Structure with bars for housing animals.
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other people’s rights. Quite soon Susan was going up to the room only because it was a
lesson it was a pity to drop. Then she took sewing20 up there, and the children and Mrs.
Parkes came in and out: it had become another family room.

[…]

But she had let herself in for it—an interminable stretch of time with a lover, called
Michael21, as part of a gallant civilised foursome. Well, she could not, and she would
not.
She got up, dressed, went down to find Mrs. Parkes, and asked her for the loan of a
pound, since Matthew, she said, had forgotten to leave her money. She exchanged with
Mrs. Parkes variations on the theme that husbands are all the same, they don’t think, and
without saying a word to Sophie22, whose voice could be heard upstairs from the
telephone, walked to the underground, travelled to South Kensington, changed to the
Inner Circle23, got out at Paddington, and walked to Fred’s Hotel. There she told Fred24
that she wasn’t going on holiday after all, she needed the room. She would have to wait
an hour, Fred said. She went to a busy tearoom-cum-restaurant around the corner, and
sat watching the people flow in and out the door that kept swinging open and shut,
watched them mingle and merge, and separate, felt her being flow into them, into their
movement. When the hour was up, she left a half-crown for her pot of tea, and left the
place without looking back at it, just as she had left her house, the big, beautiful white
house, without another look, but silently dedicating it to Sophie. She returned to Fred,
received the key of Number 19, now free, and ascended the grimy stairs slowly, letting
floor after floor fall away below her, keeping her eyes lifted, so that floor after floor
descended jerkily to her level of vision, and fell away out of sight.
Number 19 was the same. She saw everything with an acute, narrow, checking glance:
the cheap shine of the satin spread, which had been replaced carelessly after the two

20
Repairing clothes.
21
To prevent her husband from asking more questions, she invented a lover, a Michael Plant, a publisher. Her
husband then suggested that Susan and her lover meet him and his lover for dinner. She agreed, knowing she
could not do it.
22
An au pair, a young girl from Hamburg, Germany, hired to look after her children.
23
A London Underground line.
24
Owner of this hotel, which is an hourly hotel usually let to couples who want to have sex.
10
bodies had finished their convulsions under it; a trace of powder on the glass that topped
the chest of drawers; an intense green shade in a fold of the curtain. She stood at the
window, looking down, watching people pass and pass and pass until her mind went
dark from the constant movement. Then she sat in the wicker chair25, letting herself go
slack. But she had to be careful, because she did not want, today, to be surprised by
Fred’s knock at five o’clock.
The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom
from them. She was slipping already into the dark fructifying dream that seemed to
caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood … but she had to think about
Matthew first. Should she write a letter for the coroner? But what should she say? She
would like to leave him with the look on his face she had seen this morning—banal,
admittedly, but at least confidently healthy. Well, that was impossible, one did not look
like that with a wife dead from suicide. But how to leave him believing she was dying
because of a man—because of the fascinating publisher Michael Plant? Oh, how
ridiculous! How absurd! How humiliating! But she decided not to trouble about it,
simply not to think about the living. If he wanted to believe she had a lover, he would
believe it. And he did want to believe it. Even when he had found out that there was no
publisher in London called Michael Plant, he would think: Oh poor Susan, she was
afraid to give me his real name.
And what did it matter whether he married Phil Hunt26 or Sophie? Though it ought to
be Sophie, who was already the mother of those children … and what hypocrisy to sit
here worrying about the children, when she was going to leave them because she had
not got the energy to stay.
She had about four hours. She spent them delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself
slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river. Then, with hardly a break in her
consciousness, she got up, pushed the thin rug27 against the door, made sure the windows
were tight shut, put two shillings in the meter28, and turned on the gas. For the first time

25
Chair made of thin pieces of wood twisted together.
26
Matthew’s lover.
27
Small carpet.
28
A device that measures the amount of gas used, and it is fed with coins to operate.
11
since she had been in the room she lay on the hard bed that smelled stale, that smelled
of sweat and sex.
She lay on her back on the green satin cover, but her legs were chilly. She got up, found
a blanket folded in the bottom of the chest of drawers, and carefully covered her legs
with it. She was quite content lying there, listening to the faint soft hiss of the gas that
poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark river.

Tasks and activities

A. Warm-up
1. Family life is not always easy. Please draw a mind map around ‘family’ in which
you arrange the different family members. Add possible conflicts / difficulties or
positive influences that you connect with them.

2. Work with a partner to do a brainstorming about the 1960s: What do you know about
the 1960s in Great Britain (and the Western world)? What happened in popular
culture? What happened in politics? Which social movements were active? Take
notes and present your ideas to the class.

B. Language and vocabulary

1. Please put together world fields (3-5 words or phrases) on each of the
following concepts. You may use the text excerpt as a source of ideas.
 Domestic work
 A mother and wife’s responsibilities
 A father and husband’s responsibilities

2. Matching exercise: Please link the terms with their correct definitions on the
right-hand side.

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 1 Someone pretends to believe something that
A. sub-editor they do not really believe
2 A person who checks and makes changes to
B. limelight texts, especially for a newspaper
C. discrimination 3 The money borrowed from a bank in order to
buy a house
D. privacy 4 A group of four people who do an activity
together
E. mortgage
5 The ability to see the difference between two
F. coroner things or people
6 An official who examines the reasons for a
G. hypocrisy person's death
7 Public attention and interest
H. foursome
8 Someone's right to keep their personal matters
secret

C. Comprehension
Please answer the following questions in sentences.
1. From whose perspective has the story been written?

2. Please summarise each of the three parts in one sentence.

3. Put the five actions from the text in the right order by numbering them.
a. They had twins.
b. Susan borrowed a pound from Mrs. Parkes.
c. “Mother’s room” was set up at the top of the house.
d. They bought a gardened house in Richmond.
e. They hired a cleaning woman (charwoman).
f. Susan and Matthew got married.
g. They lived in a charming flat in South Kensington.
h. Most of Susan and Matthew’s friends got married.

D. Exploring the text

1. Name some topics of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s. Which ones
can be found in the short story (in Susan’s life)?
13
2. How is middle-class life in Britain characterised in the story?

3. Discuss the following task with a partner and be prepared to present your ideas in
class: Susan does not feel free. Please describe why she does not feel free (see
especially the middle part of the story).

E. Creative tasks

1. Consider that Susan does not feel free although she has a very comfortable life.
Compare your understanding of freedom with hers. What do you think is necessary
to feel free? Do you feel free? When do you feel free, and when do you not feel free?
Discuss these questions with a partner and be prepared to present your ideas to the
class.

2. Write a more optimistic ending. What could have happened at home or in the café
that made Susan change her mind? (ca. 500 words in English)

5.3 Douglas Dunn, Men of Terry Street (1969)

1. Douglas Dunn (1942 – ): The author and his literary career
Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Scotland. He worked as a librarian in Scotland
and the United States. Later, from 1967, studied English at the University of Hull.
Working at the university library, he came to know poet Philip Larkin. Since the 1980s,
he has been Professor of English and Director of St Andrew's Scottish Studies Institute
at St Andrew's University, Scotland. He served as a member of the Scottish Arts Council
and regularly writes articles and reviews for newspapers such as the Glasgow Herald.
His first poetry collections, Men of Terry Street (1969), and The Happier Life (1972)
were critically acclaimed and are largely related to his time in Hull, a Northern industrial
city with a vivid working-class culture, where he also edited Rumoured City: New Poets
from Hull (1982).

14
Dunn’s poetry took a more political character with the volume Barbarians (1979), in
which he poetically addresses and criticises class privileges. In the 1980s, his concerns
shift to Scotland, resulting in, for example St. Kilda’s Parliament (1981) about
democracy on the now deserted island of St. Kilda. His volume Elegies (1985), written
after the death of his wife, is considered to be among the greatest works of poetic
mourning. Dunn has continued to write poems on landscape and many other topics.
He also wrote short stories, which were published in collections such as Secret Villages
(1985), and he has also been active as an editor of various s anthologies of poetry and
short stories and written several TV and radio plays.

2. Introduction to the poems

The poems “Men of Terry Street” and “A Removal from Terry Street” were published
in 1969 in a collection with the title Men of Terry Street. At that time, Douglas Dunn
lived in the Northern English city of Hull (Kingston upon Hull), a busy port and
industrial city which also housed heavy industries and chemical industries. Terry Street
is the name of a street in the inner city of Hull. With his wife, Dunn lived in a flat in that
area, and neighbours provided him with the subjects of his poetry. Even today, the area
around Terry Street is relatively poor and contains a higher-than-average share of social
housing but features community services such as a centre for homeless people.

15
Text B. Douglas Dunn, two poems from the collection Men of Terry Street (1969)

First poem

Men of Terry Street

They come in at night, leave in the early morning.

I hear their footsteps, the ticking of bicycle chains,
Sudden blasts of motorcycles, whimpering of vans.
Somehow I am either in bed, or the curtains are drawn.

This masculine invisibility makes gods of them,

A pantheon of boots and overalls.
But when you see them, home early from work
Or at their Sunday leisure, they are too tired

And bored to look long at comfortably.

It hurts to see their faces, too sad of too jovial.
They quicken their step at the smell of cooking,
They hold up their children and sing to them.

Tasks and activities for “Men of Terry Street”

A. Warm-up

 Discuss the daily routines of working people. Work in pairs.

B. Comprehension

1. Read the poem and answer the following questions.

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a) What is the setting of the poem "Men of Terry Street"?
A. A suburban neighbourhood
B. A rural village
C. An industrial street in Hull
D. A bustling city centre
b) How does the poet describe the men of Terry Street?
A. Wealthy businessmen
B. Retired elders
C. Hardworking, routine-driven individuals
D. Adventurous youngsters
c) What type of imagery is used to describe the men's daily routines?
A. Bright and colourful imagery
B. Abstract and surreal imagery
C. Dark and mysterious imagery
D. Realistic and vivid imagery
d) Which theme is central in "Men of Terry Street"?
A. The excitement of city life
B. The challenges of fame and fortune
C. The resilience of working-class life
D. The beauty of nature
e) What could be the meaning of the title "Men of Terry Street"?
A. To emphasize the luxurious lifestyle of the men
B. To highlight the women of the community
C. To focus on the life of the working-class men
D. To describe a historical event

2. Read the poem aloud, practise presenting it adequately. Pay attention to rhythm
and intonation.

D. Exploring the text

Answer the questions below. Discuss your answers with a partner.

1. How might the poem illustrate the social and economic conditions of its time?

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2. How does the poem achieve a balance between celebrating the men’s endurance and
acknowledging the challenges of their lives?

D. Creative task

Transform the poem into a short prose narrative (200 words) in English that describes
the routines of the workers’ daily lives.

Second poem

A Removal from Terry Street

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,

A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus US Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

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Tasks and activities for “A Removal from Terry Street”

A. Warm-up

Work in pairs to discuss the following question: Have you or your parents ever moved
to another home? What physical and emotional changes happened or may happen?

B. Comprehension

1. Read the poem and answer following questions.

a) What is the theme of "A Removal from Terry Street"?
A. Adventure and discovery
B. The impact of poverty and displacement
C. Celebration and festivity
D. Romantic love and relationships
b) How does the poet describe the process of moving in "A Removal from Terry Street"?
A. As a joyful and liberating experience
B. As a chaotic and overwhelming task
C. As an exciting adventure
D. As a simple and straightforward activity
c) What does the poem suggest about the speaker’s attitude toward the move?
A. The speaker is excited and eager for the change
B. The speaker feels sad but also wishes for a better life for the family
C. The speaker is indifferent and unaffected
D. The speaker finds the move to be a mere inconvenience
d) Which of the following ideas can be inferred from the poem?
A. The poem represents the joy of new beginnings
B. The poem signifies the disorganization and overwhelming nature of the move
C. The poem highlights the simplicity of the new home
D. The poem emphasizes the tranquillity of the old home

2.Read the poem aloud, practise presenting it adequately. Pay attention to rhythm and
intonation. As a model, please use the reading given on the website “The Poetry
Archive”: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/removal-from-terry-street/
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C. Exploring the text

Answer the questions below. Discuss your answers with a partner.

1. What is the central event described in the poem "A Removal from Terry Street"?

2. How does the poem illustrate the atmosphere of the move? What atmosphere is
created by the poem?

D. Creative task

The family is moving to another home. What do you imagine the new flat looks like?
Write down (200 words in English) how you imagine their life in a new working-class
home, maybe a high-rise building. How big is the flat, how many rooms does it have,
does it have a garden, etc.?

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