Rayner Heppenstall - Early Life

Early Life

He was a student at the University of Leeds, where he read English and Modern Languages, graduating in 1932. He had a brief teaching career, in Dagenham.

Coming to London in 1934, he rapidly made initial contacts in the literary world. A short study Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality (1934) brought him for a time into John Middleton Murry's Adelphi commune at "The Oaks", where in 1935 he worked as a cook. In 1935, also, he met Dylan Thomas, sent to meet him by Sir Richard Rees of the Adelphi magazine. In short order he became a Catholic convert, and married Margaret Edwards in 1937. In the mid-1930s he was influenced by Eric Gill.

He was a friend of George Orwell, encountered also in 1935 through Thomas and Rees, and later wrote about him in his memoir Four Absentees. Heppenstall, Orwell and the Irish poet Michael Sayers shared a flat, in Lawford Road, Camden. Heppenstall once came home drunk and noisy, and when Orwell emerged from his bedroom and asked him to pipe down, Heppenstall took a swing at him. Orwell then beat him up with a shooting-stick, and the following morning told him to move out. Friendship was restored, but after Orwell's death, Heppenstall wrote an account of the incident called The Shooting-Stick.

During World War II, he was in the British Army, but with a Pay Corps posting at Reading, close enough to remain in touch with literary Fitzrovia. He was also posted to Northern Ireland.