A young man, in a time of war, is setting out to write the greatest story in the world. For four pages the author lists – with irony? – what the novice must overlook and forget if he’s to get underway, from “The gap toothed window high above his head, empty of glass as a poet’s hand of pence” to a fish glue factory “acrid as a jackal’s dream.”

The new writer fails once. “Who am I to make or break a world,” he asks himself, terrified. But on he goes. He fails twice. “There is no story in me,” he laments, “there is no story in the world of men. For the world is only a living graveyard, the crafty antechamber to death. The only story is pain…” At this point the reader will have realised Treece is not drafting a student primer with a happy ending. The story that matters will never be written, he concludes: “It is only the dead who can write the words of gold: and their pens are dry.”

He’s overstating his case. No doubt he knows it. But in a few pages enduring questions about meaning and making, selection, ethics, motivation, application, and modes of writing are raised.

The New Apocalyptics were a mythologised group of wartime poets, essayists and short story writers of which Treece was a leading member and editor. They drew variously on surrealism, neo-romanticism, anarchism, Christian iconography, myth and extreme day-to-day wartime experiences. They typed in a blacked out and blitzed corridor between the modernism of the Transition years and the comic and sometimes angry realism of the fifties.

After the war Treece made a fresh start, becoming a highly successful writer of historical fiction for children. The Children’s Crusade, Viking’s Dawn and, above all, Man with a Sword – about a local resistance hero, Hereward the Wake – were how I learnt to read.

Long disregarded and slighted, the wartime poetry of the apocalyptics has recently been anthologised to great acclaim. Their short stories should be too.

First published in The White Horseman: Prose and Verse of the New Apocalypse, ed. G. F. Hendry and Henry Treece, Routledge, 1941, and collected in I Cannot Go Hunting Tomorrow, Grey Walls Press, 1946