Page "Mervyn Peake" Paragraph 14

A book of nonsense poems, Rhymes Without Reason, was published in 1944 and was described by John Betjeman as " outstanding ".

Shortly after the war ended in 1945 he was commissioned by a magazine to visit France and Germany.

With writer Tom Pocock he was among the first British civilians to witness the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp at Belsen, where the remaining prisoners, too sick to be moved, were dying before his very eyes.

He made several drawings, but not surprisingly he found the experience profoundly harrowing, and expressed in deeply felt poems the ambiguity of turning their suffering into art.