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.
In November 1943 Welch was introduced to Eric Oliver, a handsome young man who was working as a ‘land boy’. Oliver was wearing ‘green battle-dress trousers, Wellingtons, and a jersey and white shirt, open’, Welch recorded with his characteristic attention to physical detail; ‘also white tops of pants showing above the trousers, large leather belt, face red-brown, with a very good throat’.
Welch was instantly smitten, but Oliver took a great deal of wooing, much of it carried out in the letters published in this volume. ‘You have gone and I am sitting over my supper […] & listening to “I will give you the keys of Heaven” on the wireless,’ Welch unguardedly writes after one of Oliver’s early visits, and many of these letters make painful reading.
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