Peter had been writing poetry since he was sixteen, although I don’t
know if he ever confessed as much to his school friends. Here is one
written in 1930.

On a Tram-waiter

Roads sombres
smokeyness greys the yellow-grey heavens
shoddy clotheshops scarletrams brutal chrome-and-purple
posters gloomy sameness of passers by
women white faced and crimson-mouthed
men white jowled and crimson-pimpled
Lust and Greed struggling for supremacy:
horrors of overdressed sluts parading as humans
herding in vehicles, cattle-like, men ogling
bold-looks-returning, men arming their concubines
gripping their waists with dirty-nailed hands,
unshaven men jeering, hobbling of deformed monsters,
redolence of dust, grease, and fish-and-chips –
And in the midst, she lovelinessing.

He had obviously been reading Hopkins whose poems had been issued in a popular edition in that year.

Encouraged by his father, he had decided by then that he was going to write, and he filled notebooks with descriptions as he had tried to develop a style. I won’t include much that he wrote during the next two years, as, like a pianist practising, he wrote similar descriptions over and over again until he satisfied himself.

Here is one, written on July 11th 1932, aged 18:

A landscape of immense significance – expansive serenity its main virtue. The sky the palest blue-grey and extraordinarily wide, Hamlet’s “wide and majestical canopy of heaven”. A few fluffy swirls of feathery clouds thrown here and there – carelessly and unpicturesquely, but the main mass of evening cloud abreast. The sky edged on the horizon with a slightly greenish-blue wash – irregularly fitting into a nebulous watery suggestion of salmon mauve shading into an internally bright lemon-yellow. etc. etc.