A Deep Dive Into WH Auden’s Early Years

Twenty-five years ago, my father and I were out walking in the Peak District. Beside us was his dog; ahead of us was a familiar fell, low and craggy and bare. My dad was boasting, as he often did, about the cairn at its top, a pile of rocks he claimed to have nurtured into existence, when from nowhere the silhouette of a man suddenly appeared beside it: first a head, then a torso, and finally a pair of legs. “Ah,” said my dad, sage where I was startled. “A caver.” We stood and squinted. Moments later, another man materialised, and then another: a human string of sausages, pulled from the limestone’s darkest reaches as if from a top hat.