Competition: This be the reverse

In Competition No. 2730 you were invited to supply a refutation in verse of Philip Larkin’s assertion ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’.

‘This Be The Verse’ may not be Larkin’s finest poem but it is certainly his best-known and most oft-quoted (he himself wryly commented that he fully expected to hear it recited by a thousand Girl Guides before he died). The challenge generated a large and generally impressive postbag. Commendations to Frank Osen, Adrian Fry, Robert Schechter and John Whitworth.

Star of the show is Alan Millard, who pockets the extra fiver. His fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

You lying toad! Your love of booze
Together with that verse’s fame
Lets kids, with words we’d never choose,
Dump on us parents all the blame.
 
We tuck them up when dark descends
And buck them up through daylight hours
And, later, tolerate their friends
Whose alien ways are not like ours.
 
But kids, like youngsters all, in turn,
Will one day wear old hats and coats
And, sadly, find there’s more to learn
When they’ve dispersed their wild oats.
 
This be my verse, and this the truth,
As one discovers if one delves:
Youth hands on misery to youth
By blaming parents, not themselves.
Alan Millard

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Matthew Parris

What if Trump is just bonkers?

Come off it, Phil! You’re glad enough
To take the perks of how you are.
It animates your verse, that stuff —
The unhealed wound beneath the scar.
Un-fucked-up, my God, you’d be
A Sunday poet, knitting rhymes —
Husband, father, Dockery,
Not the skewer of our times.
Your being, shall we say, cross-wired
Has gained you more than all your skill:
It’s meant much writing’s been ‘required’
And given you an Hon D, Phil.
Far better thank your Mum and Dad
For what they did, or didn’t do:
What they passed on can’t be so bad
If what you’ve got lives after you.
W.J. Webster


They’ve given you, your Mum and Dad,
The bringing-up that breeds success,
You’re pretty lucky that you’ve had
A childhood of unhappiness.