John Pudney
John Sleigh Pudney was born in Langley, Buckinghamshire. He attended Gresham's School, where he was a contemporary of W.H. Auden. He worked as a radio producer and scriptwriter for the BBC and as a war correspondent, before joining the RAF in 1940. Before the war he had written two published books of verse, Spring Encounter and Open the Sky, two collections of stories and Jacobson's Ladder, a novel. During the war he was recruited by the British Government to write about the work of air crews in a way that could be understood by the general public. A Squadron Leader, he served in Africa, the Mediterranean and France.
He became a reviewer for the Daily Express after the end of the war and Literary Editor of News Review from 1948-1950. He then joined the publishers Putnam as a director. He was an extraordinarily prolific writer, producing twenty collections of poetry, dozens of novels, children's books, short stories and two plays. His non-fiction included a history of lavatories, The Smallest Room, and an official history of the Battle of Malta.
Probably his most famous poem, 'For Johnny', was written on the back of an envelope during an air raid on London in 1941. This simple, twelve-lined poem seemed to encapsulate the mood of the war taking place in the air at this time. It first appeared in the News Chronicle and was read on radio by Lawrence Olivier and quoted by Michael Redgrave in a war time film, The Way to The Stars, and has appeared in numerous anthologies:
“Dylan [Thomas] I knew before and after he became famous. He was splendid, rapacious, demanding as a young man. To much has been written about him for me to add to the legend. As that legend began to grow in his lifetime I learned to separate him from his poetry, to find him in person increasingly tedious and his poems increasingly exciting, both in print and when he was reading them.”
“I think I was about twenty-five when I first said - more or less to myself - that I was quite a good second-rate poet. I repeated it aloud in a Guardian interview in 1976, and some people thought I was a coy old thing.”
“Do not despair.........For Johnny-head-in-air;He sleeps as sound.....As Johnny underground.Fetch out no shroud....For Johnny-in-the-cloud;And keep your tears....For him in after years.Better by far..........For Johnny-the-bright-star,To keep your head......And see his children fed.”