David Shaw

I have been reading Ian Bostridge’s fine new book, Winter Journey, during one of the most wintry months of the year. It is a month during which my dear friend David Shaw has died in Hull, where for many years he assisted Philip Larkin in the university library. His death was on February 10, the day on which another dear friend, Lynne Walker, who was married to yet another dear friend,  the music critic Gerald Larner, died four years ago.  February, more than ever, can seem a heartless time, and reading Bostridge’s book about a composer who died at 31 has intensified my desolation.

I knew David, who had just turned 82, for 75 years, from our earliest Edinburgh schooldays, when we rode our tricycles (mine blue, his black with big wheels) around Davidson’s Mains, where we grew up and played merry Scottish street games, such as kick-the-can, in and around a triangular patch  of grass, laurel bushes, and water, at one corner of which two quiet roads merged.

We enjoyed this more than we enjoyed our school, a turreted place of torment and, at times, humiliation, which we spent the rest of our lives recalling together - cheerfully enough by then and with a wry humour we shared whenever the subject cropped up.

David, in fact, was a gloriously humorous man, who never got married but who would have made a great husband for the wife he never found. Although, for most of our careers, we lived far apart, we conversed frequently by phone and met whenever he was in Edinburgh, which was several times a year, staying with one or other of his sisters, attending the Festival, or seeing plays in Pitlochry, a place he loved to visit.

Though he was a Scot (born in Hamilton) through and through, he stayed on in Hull, where he had many friends, after his retirement. Though Kingsley Amis, Larkin’s best friend, despised it, David thought it not so bad a place in which to live, as indeed did the doleful Larkin himself.

My wife, who has friends of her own there, has visited it periodically, and I have happily gone with her. I liked it, too. On one occasion David joined us for a barbecue and arrived by taxi carrying two bottles of vintage Chateauneuf du Pape. He was generous as well as jolly - the perfect party guest.

The last time we saw him down there we had been holidaying in the Yorkshire Wolds with our daughters  and agreed to meet him in Beverley, a lovely town, for a bar lunch in an attractive hotel on the square. We gathered around one o’clock. We were still there at seven, sitting in the garden, increasingly reluctant to depart.

After Larkin’s death, I tried to persuade David to write a book about his former boss, but he would have none of it. He was not a writer. Many books, he rightly said, would come to be written about Larkin by other people.

Though I once suggested that I write David’s book myself, and though he showed faint interest, the idea never got anywhere.  Whenever he and I met in Edinburgh with friends - usually in the bar of the Sheraton or over a meal at the Braid Hills Hotel - we always talked about other topics. We did not lack things to say.

Last week my wife drove to Hull for the funeral, with one of our daughters. Fearing I might lack the stamina needed for the winter journey, they persuaded me to stay at home.  After the service they met his friends and neighbours in the aptly-named Goodfellowship Inn and told me all about it when they got back. And now I am reading Ian Bostridge’s Winter Journey about a forlorn masterpiece composed almost two centuries ago, which seems the timely thing to do.
23 February 2015