Vernon Scannell

Chapter 1 · John Vernon Bain

A violent father and the fairground booths

1922 – 1940 · Spilsby · Aylesbury · Beeston

He was born John Vernon Bain in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, in 1922, and brought up in Aylesbury and Beeston. His father James was a photographer and a violent man. Scannell wrote about him repeatedly and without ornament: the unpredictability, the fear in a house where a mood could turn, the way a child learns to read a room before he can read a book.

That is the origin of his subject. Scannell did not think of violence as something that arrives from outside ordinary life and interrupts it. He thought it lived inside ordinary life — in families, in games, in streets — and that war is not a different thing from a father's temper but the same thing with more equipment.

He left school at fourteen and boxed. Fairground booths worked on a simple principle: a professional stood in the ring and any member of the public who could last three rounds took a prize. Scannell fought as the professional. It was brutal, badly paid work, and it taught him two things he used for the rest of his life — that pain is mostly a matter of what you have decided to accept, and that a bout has a shape which must be held.

He applied that second lesson to verse. His poems keep to regular metre for decades after the fashion abandoned it, and the metre almost never announces itself.

Why this matters

Scannell's claim that violence is a normal component of domestic life rather than an intrusion into it was unfashionable when he wrote and looks more accurate with time.

You have the boy in that house and the boy in the booth. What would you ask?

Ask Scannell

• “What does a child learn in a house where the mood can turn?”
• “What did boxing in the booths teach you about writing a line?”
• “Is violence an interruption of ordinary life or part of it?”
• “Why keep to strict metre when nobody else was?”
• “How much of your father is in the poems?”

Chapter 2 · Alamein

What he saw, and what he did about it

1940 – 1943 · North Africa · El Alamein · Egypt

He joined the Gordon Highlanders in 1940 and went to North Africa. He fought at El Alamein in the autumn of 1942 — the battle that turned the desert war, and by any account among the most punishing infantry actions of the period.

Afterwards, in the aftermath of the fighting, he watched men going over the bodies of the dead — British and German alike — taking watches, rings and money. Something in him refused. He walked away from his unit.

He was picked up, court-martialled, and served six months in a military prison in the Middle East. Military detention in that period was designed to break men, and by his account it very nearly did.

It is important not to soften this into heroism. Desertion in wartime is a serious offence and Scannell never claimed otherwise. He also never described what he had done as principled resistance; his own accounts are closer to a physical inability to continue than to a decision. The two memoirs he wrote about the war — *The Tiger and the Rose* and *Argument of Kings* — are unusual precisely because they refuse both the heroic and the self-exculpating versions.

He was released, returned to duty, and was sent to England to train for the invasion of France.

Why this matters

Scannell is one of very few English poets of the century who wrote about combat from inside the infantry, and who declined every opportunity to make it sound like anything but what it was.

You have the battle and the looting he could not watch. What is your question?

Ask Scannell

• “What did you see after Alamein that made you walk away?”
• “Was deserting a decision, or something that happened to you?”
• “What was the military prison actually like?”
• “What does an account of war get wrong when it flatters the soldier?”
• “Did the men you left behind ever forgive you?”

Chapter 3 · A Name From the Telephone Directory

Caen, a second desertion, and years under another identity

1944 – 1950 · Normandy · Caen · London · Leeds

He landed in Normandy in 1944 and was wounded in the legs by machine-gun fire near Caen. In hospital, facing return to the front, he walked out a second time.

He lived for years under an assumed name, taking casual work and moving on. He was eventually picked up in 1945, and — rather than being tried again — was examined, found to be mentally unwell, and discharged from the army on those grounds. What that diagnosis would be called now is a different question; the language of 1945 did not have much of it.

When he needed a name that was not John Bain, he opened a telephone directory and took Vernon Scannell out of it. He used it for the rest of his life and published everything under it.

He studied at Leeds under the poet and critic Bonamy Dobrée, taught English at a boys' school in Hampshire, boxed a little more, and began to publish. And he drank — heavily, for most of his adult life, and he said so in print rather than allowing it to be discovered. His domestic life was turbulent; he had six children across two long relationships, and he wrote about his own failures as a partner and a father with a bleakness that is uncomfortable to read and which he did not soften.

He is not a poet who can be presented as a good man who had a hard time.

Why this matters

Scannell's own accounts of his desertions, his drinking and his conduct at home are unusually unsparing, and reading him honestly means not editing them out.

You have the second desertion and the borrowed name. What would you put to him?

Ask Scannell

• “Why take a name out of a telephone directory?”
• “What was it like living under an assumed name for years?”
• “Being discharged as mentally unwell — was that accurate?”
• “Why write about your own drinking rather than let it be found out?”
• “Did writing honestly about your failures make up for any of them?”

Chapter 4 · Nobody Comes

Hide and Seek, and one line that changes thirteen

1957 · A garden

*Hide and Seek* was published in *The Masks of Love* in 1957. A boy hides in a garden shed among the sacks and the flowerpots. He hears the seekers come close, hold their breath, and go. He congratulates himself. He waits. He waits longer. Then he comes out — and the poem's last line finds him standing in a cold, darkening garden where nobody is there at all.

Two technical decisions carry it. First, it is written in the second person and the present tense: *call out*, *don't sneeze*, *they're moving closer*. The reader is not watching a boy hide. The reader is the one hiding. Second, thirteen lines of whispered excitement and self-congratulation are followed by a single line of exposure, so the whole weight of the poem falls on its ending — a structure Scannell used again and again.

It works on eleven-year-olds and on adults for different reasons, which is the mark of a durable poem. A child reads a game that goes wrong. An adult reads something about hiding too well, about the price of concealment, and — knowing what Scannell did in North Africa and Normandy — about coming out of hiding to find the world has gone on without you.

The poem never says any of that. It stays a garden, a shed and a boy.

“The bushes hold their breath; the sun is gone.”

— Vernon Scannell, 'Hide and Seek', The Masks of Love (1957)

Why this matters

Hide and Seek is a compact demonstration that point of view does the emotional work: the second person makes the reader, not a character, the one nobody comes for.

You have the shed, the sacks and the empty garden. What would you ask?

Ask Scannell

• “Why write the poem as 'you' rather than 'he'?”
• “What does the last line do to the thirteen before it?”
• “Should a reader bring your war into this poem, or leave it out?”
• “Is a garden game really about violence?”
• “Why let the shed and the sacks stay ordinary?”

Chapter 5 · Fifty Years of Writing Against the Fashion

A working poet, out of step and still going

1957 – 2007 · Hampshire · Berkshire · Otley

Scannell wrote for another fifty years: poems, novels, criticism, two war memoirs, books for children, and a study of the poets of the Second World War. He taught, broadcast, reviewed, and for a period was a full-time writer on very little money. *The Loving Game* (1975) won a Cholmondeley Award. He was appointed to a Civil List pension in recognition of his service to literature.

He was consistently out of step. The mainstream of British poetry moved through the Movement, then confessionalism, then various kinds of experiment; Scannell kept writing narrative poems in regular metre about boxing, war, childhood and drink. Reviewers who valued novelty had little use for him. Readers, and particularly teachers, kept him in print.

He wrote about ageing with the same absence of self-flattery he had brought to everything else — the body failing, the reputation not arriving, the awareness that he had done damage he could not repair.

He died at his home in Otley, Yorkshire, in November 2007, aged eighty-five, of cancer, having declined further treatment and kept writing nearly to the end.

His war poems — *Walking Wounded*, *The Great War*, *Casualty: Mental Ward* — are increasingly read as among the most honest English accounts of what combat does to the people who survive it.

Why this matters

Scannell's fifty-year refusal of literary fashion cost him reputation in his lifetime and is the reason the poems still read plainly today.

You have half a century of writing against the grain. What is your question for him?

Ask Scannell

• “What did being out of step with fashion actually cost you?”
• “Why did teachers keep you in print when reviewers did not?”
• “What does combat do to the men who come home?”
• “Is there damage you did that writing could not repair?”
• “What would you tell a young poet who has been told they are unfashionable?”

What Scannell changed

Scannell wrote about war from inside the infantry and refused every chance to make it heroic, and his insistence that violence lives inside ordinary domestic life rather than arriving from outside it has aged better than most of the poetry that displaced him. Hide and Seek is taught across Britain and works on children and adults for entirely different reasons, which is the surest test a short poem can pass.

A debate that continues

Critics disagree over whether Scannell's strict traditional forms kept him readable or kept him marginal, and over how far his own unsparing accounts of his desertions and private conduct should govern how the poems are read.

Keep exploring — ask Scannell

• “Which of your poems would you want a fifteen-year-old to meet first?”
• “Can a poem in strict metre still sound like a man talking?”
• “What did the ring teach you that the army did not?”

Related lives

• Rudyard Kipling — Who Wrote Thirty-Two Lines Of Conditions
• U. A. Fanthorpe — Who Listened At The Reception Window
• D. H. Lawrence — Who Trusted The Blood Over The Head
• George Orwell — Chronicler of the Total State

Related themes

War poetry · Point of view · Violence and childhood