I Left My Grandfather's House

Denton Welch was born in 1915 in Shanghai and educated in England. When he was sixteenth he ran away from Repton School, an episode later described in his first autobiographical book, Maiden Voyage (1943). He enrolled at the Goldsmiths' School of Art in 1933 to study painting. He showed great promise as an artist but in June 1935 he was knocked off his bicycle by a motorist; for the rest of his life he was a semi-invalid. The accident and his long convalescence form the basis of A Voice Through a Cloud, posthumously published in 1950 and recently reissued by Enitharmon. Welch's other books are In Youth is Pleasure (1945; reissued by Enitharmon 2005), Brave and Cruel (1949), and A Last Sheaf (1951).