Undone by love

On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint after the accident, but also began writing the autobiographical fiction for which he is now best known, publishing his first novel, Maiden Voyage, in 1943. By this time he was living in a chauffeur’s flat over a garage in rural Kent. When well, he was able to walk and bicycle around the countryside, exploring buildings and hunting for antiques, and watching young men bathing, their likely fate in the war emphasising his already well-developed sense of the fragility of life. He recorded all this in finely observed detail in his posthumously published journals, which provide a hauntingly elegiac picture of 1940s England under threat.