Richard Church (poet)

[2] His father was a sorter for the General Post Office and his mother was a schoolteacher who suffered ill-health and died in 1910 when he was only seventeen.

After leaving school at sixteen, he started work as a clerk in the Customs and Excise branch of the Civil Service.

[1] In his first volume of autobiography he recounts the physicality of his father, the intelligence of his mother, his resourceful older brother, privations, and the difficult relationship of his ill-matched parents.

[3] His first book of poems, The Flood of Life, was published in 1917 when he was 24, but he remained in the Civil Service until 1933, when he left to write full-time at the age of 40.

At first, he did not believe his own powers of perception, but after concentrating on his vision and hearing, he came to the conclusion that he was experiencing an error in the laws of physics.

From where he stood he sensed that "(...) my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground, out of the tyranny of gravitation".

[1][8] He and Dorothy initially lived at The Old Stable, they subsequently moved to The Priest's House at Sissinghurst Castle in Cranbrook where he died suddenly, aged 78, on 4 March 1972.