Wendy Cope (1945-) published her first collection of poetry `Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’ in 1986, after a career as a primary school teacher, an editor and television critic for `The Spectator’. While her output has been slight, with five collections in all of adult poetry, she has gained a wide following, and been given two significant literary prizes – the Cholmondeley Award in 1987, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Michael Braude Award in 1995.
Cope was born in Erith, at the edge of Kent, and spent her childhood in the Borough of Bexley, part of historic Kent, though now within the London suburban area. Her father, Fred, was manager of the Erith Hedley Mitchell Department store. She has written of her upbringing in this area:
`I was born in Erith, Kent, a place few people have heard of and even fewer can pronounce – the first syllable rhymes with beer, not with berry. The late comedian Linda Smith was born in the same town. She once said: “Erith has a suicide pact with Dagenham.” Dagenham is directly opposite Erith, on the north side of the Thames’ (`Wendy Cope on Erith: ‘A place few people have heard of and even fewer can pronounce’, Guardian, 5th May 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/05/wendy-cope-made-in-erith)
The location of her birth has clearly played some part in her later development. This is a place which typifies South London suburbia now, although Erith with its riverside location has plenty of history. `When I began writing poetry I was troubled by a vague feeling that a poet needed to have grown up in a beautiful rural environment, or at least somewhere exciting,’ she wrote in 2018. She learned from fellow poet Philip Larkin that, despite being bought up in such a prosaic environment, she could still be a poet:
`Erith was not prospering in the 1950s. Its riverside location reduced the catchment area and many shoppers preferred its nearby rival, Bexleyheath. Mitchells closed down in 1960 and shortly afterwards the town was redeveloped. My parents moved away in 1963. When I visited Erith a few years later, it was unrecognisable. Barnehurst [a nearby place where her family lived when she was young] had remained stolidly the same.’ (Ibid)
After attending schools in Sidcup and Chislehurst, she went to Oxford to read history. Her poetry is best know for its playfulness and wit. In her second collection, `Serious Concerns’ (Faber and Faber, London, 1992), `Kindness to Animals’, was commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature:
`If I were vegetarian
And didn’t eat lambs for dinner,
I think I’d be a better person
And also thinner.
But the lamb is not endangered
And at least I can truthfully say
I have never, ever eaten a barn own,
So perhaps I am OK.’ (19)
As the author says in the prefacing note to the poem, `It was rejected as unsuitable.’