[1] Ted Walker was born in Lancing, West Sussex, the son of a carpenter from Birmingham with family roots in the village of Shrawley in rural Worcestershire who had found work in the south-coast construction industry.
[2] However, there was tragedy too: both of his paternal uncles, who lived in shared accommodation together with Walker's parents, grandparents and aunt, were killed in World War II; George in North Africa and Jack on Shoreham Beach.
[3] At the age of 15 he met Lorna Benfell, and almost immediately after they finished college they were married (in 1956, at St Mary de Haura Church, Shoreham-by-Sea).
It was at school that Walker and John Cotton, a like-minded colleague, founded a poetry magazine, Priapus, an attractive if amateur production, copies of which are now very rare.
He had also started to write poetry regularly and of a quality that made it welcome in journals such as The Listener, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Magazine.
In the 1970s Walker was a contributor to his local newspaper, The Chichester Observer, where his regular column on West Sussex villages fascinated (and often enraged) the county set.
Big Jim, a series of comedy films set during the postwar building boom, extolled the comradeship which, for Walker, epitomised working-class life "in them far-off days of the Figaro Club before the world turned lax and sour".
In The Last of England Walker tells the moving story of Lorna's disfiguring illness, and his own grief at being robbed of their anticipated years of retirement together.