This screen was created by the women’s crafting group of Newland Park, known as Knit, Natter and Nosh, who were gifted “L for Larkin” as their chosen letter - very fitting as a house on Newland Park was Larkin’s final home. From here, Philip would walk daily to the Hull University Library, the Brynmor Jones, whose remodelling he oversaw and shaped in 1970.

The Larkin screen is the culmination of a summer of craft, of meetings in shady gardens to sew and crochet, to talk, to share ideas, to negotiate, to read aloud, to laugh and to eat homemade cakes. As a result, this colourful screen captures so many images from Philip Larkin’s life and poetry. To start the project the letters were woven in cross stitch onto the mesh screen. Everyone was involved in the major preparation of the background by weaving onto the canvas backcloth. Some of the women worked in sewing, some in cross stitch, most of the flowers and musical notes were created in crochet, as was the saxophone. The work on the toad is appliqué and the hedgehogs are a combination of knitting and sewing. The signature and the portrait have been rendered in embroidery. Finally the whole was lifted onto a wooden frame made by one of the group members.

On a background depicting Spurn Point, poppies mark the “bluish neutral distance”. You can see the Queen Anne’s Lace from Cut Grass. There are buttercups and daisies to represent the meadows recalled in Going, Going. Larkin’s love of Sidney Bechet’s jazz is celebrated here with an ‘enormous YES’ and a soprano saxophone. Many of you will be familiar with the poems Toads and Toads Revisited and the Larkin Trail of Toads around Hull. It was in Newland Park that a hedgehog sadly fell victim to his lawnmower: an accident which gave rise to the elegiac The Mower. You will find a toad and escaped hedgehogs alongside a tiny mower. The transformation of the Brynmor Jones is depicted in a cross stitch “Lifted Study Storehouse”. The screen is illuminated by the “Single, stalkless flower” a “Suspended lionface.” found in the poem Solar.

This has been a chance to recall some favourite images from Larkin’s story in our city, his adopted home. A chance to share knowledge and to gain new insights; to read these poems for the first time or to revisit old favourites and to see them again through the “new eyes” of the uninitiated.

Crafters and Participants

Sheila Gaynard, Annette Schlosser, Jo Vale, Janet Edson, Pauline Riches, Judy King, Lyn Lockwood, Julie Elder, Katie Elder, Alison Carrick, Cath Boury, Val Maybury, Graham Chesters

Acknowledgements

The portrait of Philip Larkin is modelled on the cartoon, Early Larkin by cartoonist Guy Venables published in The Spectator, August 2022.

Our friend and neighbour, Gillian Armstrong made very generous contributions of materials for the screen.

Our friend and neighbour, Jo Vale made the wooden frame.

We are indebted to Pauline Riches for the delicious baking and the increase in our waistlines.

We are grateful to Graham Chesters and Lyn Lockwood from The Larkin Society for their support for this project.

Many thanks to Val Maybury for writing an article about the screen for the Larkin Society magazine from which this description has been partially extracted.

Poems by Philip Larkin featured on the screen

• Cut Grass (1974). Published in High Windows, Faber & Faber
• For Sidney Bechet (1954). Published in High Windows, (1974) Faber & Faber.
• Going, Going (1972). Published in How Do You Want To Live? (1972) U.N. Stockholm Conference and in High Windows (1974)
• Here (1961). Published in The Whitsun Weddings, (1964) Faber & Faber.
• New Eyes Each Year (1974). Published in Collected Poems, (1988), ed. Anthony Thwaite.
• On the Brynmor Jones Library, (1983). Published in Collected Poems, (1988), ed. Anthony Thwaite.
• Solar (1964). Published in High Windows, (1974), Faber & Faber.
• The Mower (1979). Humberside (Hull Literary Club, Autumn ed.)
• The Whitsun Weddings (1958). Published in The Whitsun Weddings, (1964) Faber & Faber.
• Toads (1954). Published in The Less Deceived (1955) The Marvell Press.
• Toads Revisited (1962). Published in The Whitsun Weddings, (1964) Faber & Faber.
• Trees (1967). Published in High Windows, (1974) Faber & Faber