Early Life
Ted Walker was born in Lancing, West Sussex, the son of a carpenter from Worcestershire who had found work in the south-coast construction industry. He was educated at Steyning Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages. Walker's earlier poems and later autobiographical work, in particular The High Path, show that his childhood appeared to have been unusually happy and totally remembered. Although there was tragedy too: Both of his paternal uncles, who lived in shared accommodation together with Walker's parents, grandparents and aunt, were killed in World War II; George in North Africa and Jack on Shoreham Beach.
At age 15 he met Lorna Benfell, and almost immediately after they finished college they were married (in 1956, at St Mary de Haura Church, Shoreham-by-Sea). At first they lived in west London and worked as teachers, she in Tottenham and he in Paddington and Southall. They had four children.
It was at school that Walker and John Cotton, a like-minded colleague, founded a poetry magazine, Priapus, an attractive if amateur production, copies of which are now very rare. Walker published some work in the early numbers, the beginning of his poetic career.
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