This is instalment 13 of #deanehistory.

Gavin Ewart was a poet. He was rated highly by Philip Larkin, which I find a pretty infallible recommendation in such things. He wrote wittily & funnily & talked a lot about sex.

I concede, before the left shouts it, that he wrote, looking back at his time at Cambridge, of “A little country so proud/ of Eton and such things/ in 1935-/ muted semi-Fascist, not loud,/ just smug and half-alive,/ a bit like now.” Perhaps today he’d have #FBPE in his handle.

He served our country in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War (like my step-grandfather). Precociously published pre-war, he couldn’t write during the war or a long time after. But he eventually returned to poetry & national fame & was prolific in later years.

He wrote, of a love affair gone south, that “the hands that held electric charges / now lie inert as four moored barges.” You won’t forget that. But why four? Why not two, or, for fingers, eight or ten? I puzzle over that.

Anyway, Nigel Spivey of @FT met Ewart, then 79, at the Café Royal for an instalment of their famous “Lunch with the FT” series. The FT reports that the main item had was alcohol. Ewart began with several negronis & pushed on in similar style.

The next day Spivey received a phone call from Mrs Ewart.

“There are two things you need to know. The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second – and you are not to feel bad about this – is that he died this morning.”

Of course it’s a point about a life well lived and a good death, but really it’s a thread about the magnificent and kind and thoughtful Mrs Ewart, isn’t it?

Postscript. It put me in mind of a story from Ed Murrow’s “This I Believe” @spectator’s Kate Chisholm reported- a housewife from Virginia whose husband dropped dead after laughing with her at a joke she had just made; “Louise, you gorgeous fool, he said, and then he died.”