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Your first memory. Your first kiss. Your first girlfriend. Your first cigarette. Your first job. Your first poem.
It’s a strong device when writing a memoir to use the trigger of a series of firsts to bring back recollection of your early years. And it’s a device poet and literary scholar Harry Ricketts is accomplished and well-read enough to make truly fresh.
Harry Ricketts joins RNZ’s Culture 101 to discuss First Things, a memoir of this much loved writer and teacher’s childhood and early adulthood. His first 29 years.
Ricketts recalls everything from his first shotgun to his first time dropping acid. Yes, he was a teenager of the ‘60s, with a voracious appetite for books and music, ranging from a succession of classic Western writers to Bob Dylan, interspersed by a never-ending fascination for cricket. His first loves peppering these pages.
Quiet but lively and entertaining, First Things also reminds us that growing up can be anxious and uneasy. There’s constant learning through mistakes and refreshing honesty in just how awkward it all was for the author.
For much of his youth before attending Oxford, Ricketts -- with a father in the British military -- is at boarding school and struggles with the hierarchies and codes. His first job is lecturing in English at the University of Hong Kong, returning to where his parents were stationed when he was growing up. Yet he’s quickly dissatisfied with being an expat during the last vestiges of colonial rule.
First Things ends in England with Harry Ricketts’ first marriage and the birth of his first child, leaving the reader awaiting a forthcoming volume, Last Things.
Retiring in 2022, Harry Rickets was a professor in the English programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington where he taught poetry and, more recently, non-fiction and fiction writing courses. Known for his work as an editor, critic and cricket writer, he has written biographies of Rudyard Kipling and the British First World War poets. He has published 12 volumes of poetry.
Harry Ricketts revisiting Hong Kong University after 40 years Photo: Belinda Ricketts
