First memory. First going hitchhiking. First seeing my father angry. First shotgun. First poem.
In First Things, Harry Ricketts chronicles his early life through the lens of ‘firsts’: those moments that can hold their detail and potency across a lifetime. Set mostly in Hong Kong and Oxford, these bright fragments include the places, people, writers, encounters and obsessions that have shaped Ricketts’ world, from his first friends and rivals to his first time being caned by a teacher and his first time dropping acid. There are other, more enigmatic firsts here too, like the first time he realised what really mattered, and the first time he began doubting God. ‘I wanted to believe in God and, even more, wanted God to believe in me.’
Who really were we, back then? Which parts of ourselves get to be remembered and carried along with us, and which parts are gone forever? In First Things, the gaps in between shine as brightly as the memories themselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry Ricketts is a literary scholar, biographer, essayist, reviewer, editor,
poet, and teacher of creative writing. His publications include the
internationally acclaimed The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling
(1999) and Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War (2010). His
recent poetry collections include Winter Eyes (2018) and Selected Poems (2021).
With historian David Kynaston, he is the co-author of Richie Benaud’s Blue
Suede Shoes: The Story of an Ashes Classic (Bloomsbury, 2024). First Things is
the first of two memoirs by Harry Ricketts, with Last Things forthcoming.
