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A single copy of The 2C Chronicle,
a four-page form newspaper, compiled, written and drawn on both
sides of a single sheet, and bearing on its masthead the date
of his fourteenth birthday, reveals a combination of artistic
flair, humour and close observation. This one-boy editorial and
production team was practising in a microcosmic, juvenile way
the profession of his father, Ulric Van den Bogaerde, Art Editor
of the mighty Times. During his time at art school, Dirk
wrote short plays, some with his girlfriend Nerine Cox; one of
these, Dark Comfort, they performed together at the village
hall in Newick run by her father. He wrote poetry to her - dark,
troubled lines about the so-called Great War, steeped in foreboding
at further imminent strife. Regrettably, only the first volume
of the journal he kept in the Army was spared from the bonfire
in the mid-Eighties on which he destroyed so much of his archive;
however, it contains a draft in pencil of a poem, ‘The Sniper’,
which, retitled ‘Man in the Bush’, would be published
in The Times Literary Supplement just five months after
its creator’s 20th birthday. Another, ‘Steel Cathedrals’,
about the melancholy of travel by railway for the soldier in training,
appeared in Poetry Review and many years later would
be reprinted in several anthologies.
Otherwise, apart from
a couple of magazine cartoons, nothing has surfaced of
Dirk’s writings for a wider audience from either
the European or Indian wartime theatres. <<
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