“BUT LET ME SAY BEFORE IT has to go,” proclaimed Wystan Auden, “it’s the most lovely country that I know.” Which part of England was he describing?
Full marks for “the Black Country”. Brought up in Solihull, on the bear-and-ragged-staff side of the second city, Auden had a youthful fascination with the foundries and pits which turned that country north of Birmingham black. In his amusing “letter” of self-revelation he told Lord Byron about a childhood train journey:
Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on
