The air show - Peter Scupham

Peter Scupham was born in Liverpool in 1933. He is married with four children and now lives in Hitchin where, with John Mole he has run for many years the Mandeville Press. Peter Scupham's new book of poems - his seventh - brings together the themes of childhood and war: themes which seem naturally connected to Scupham, who was himself a child during the Second World War. The intense rumours, sights and sounds of war accompany his move from Derby to a Cambridgeshire village, and are ever-present during his holidays with grandparents in Lincolnshire. Old toys, period postcards, and revisiting places of the past all help him in his attempt to crack 'Enigma', the coded complex of signals transmitted by the child he once was. He describes the details of a young boy's domestic and natural world with an almost hallucinatory precision and beauty, yet the treasured memories of childhood possess disturbing undertones, and the details lead, more often than not, to the world at war.