The pictures of Coventry station, the first in 1952, the last in 2006. "Men with number plates" - Coventry is a town that builds motor cars, which are driven by men to various garages around the country on "Trade Plates", temporary number plates to make the unregistered vehicle "street legal". "hols" are holidays or vacations, usually an annual trip to the seaside: they usually went to Devon or Cornwall. The poem is a rueful list of things that didn't happen to him, things that he wishes had happened to make his childhood more meaningful. All this happened before WW2 - he left Coventry when war broke out. "Spoken to by an old hat" could be a reference to Joseph Smith, who translated the Book or Mormon, who talked to an old hat in childhood. The "splendid family" must be a literary reference, something like Swallows and Amazons or maybe Waltons-like from the pioneering west, or an early movie. I can't place it exactly. His favourite writer at the time was DH Lawrence. Larkin ! said "I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a remote thing, like baccarat or clog-dancing, and nothing happened to alter this view" I made this reading, edited it, found the pictures and created the slide show in a total of 48 minutes. Some sound editing was necessary because several vehicles passed my window during the recording. There were also a couple of fluffs and some sibilance to be edited out, which is nothing uncommon. The point I'm making is that it's not a huge task to read poetry on
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