See You in Valhalla

Sidney Keyes was considered by his contemporaries to be the Rupert Brooke of his generation of Second World War Poets. His story is one of immense talent cut short by his death at the age of twenty-one on a Tunisian battlefield in 1943. It is now a hundred years since his birth. The novelist Rod Madocks revisits Keyes' life and celebrates the memory of a remarkable poet, an exiled lover and a courageous man who faced up to the violence of his time. Keyes' self image was of a candle flame rising up and burning the more brightly just as it was on the point of extinction.