Before he was Thom, William Guinneach Gunn, born in Gravesend on August 29, 1929, was Tom.1 “William” came from his paternal great-grandfather; “Guinneach,” the Gaelic form of “Gunn,” signifies “sharp, keen, fierce.”2 The summer of his birth was extraordinarily hot. A tomcat had sprayed inside the Gunns’ house, “so that my mother,” he wrote later, “always afterwards associated giving birth to me with the smell of cats.”3 He was never known as William. “I was Wm. Guinneach—but mother changed that,” he wrote, “& maybe it’s a bit characteristic that she did.”4

Thom knew his mother—Ann Charlotte Thomson—as Charlotte. Almost twenty-six when Thom was born, Charlotte, too, had experimented with names: at times she went by Annie, Nan, Nancy, Nanette, Ann, and Charlotte, each a new identity or a play on an old one. Restless, she was the fourth of seven sisters, and seems to have found it hard to feel like an individual among “the Thomson girls.” Charlotte was born in 1903: Barbara (1898), Margaret (1901), and Helen (1902) preceded her; Christina (1905), Mary (1907), and Catherine (1909) followed. They, too, played with names and nicknames: Barbara was Babs; Margaret, Peg; Mary, Mimi; Catherine, Kate—names that Thom would call his aunts well into adulthood. But Charlotte’s name never stuck.

“Much of what I consciously am has been formed by my mother’s family,” Thom reflected, “or by what I know about it, or perhaps I should say by a mythology of it.”5

The Thomsons were farmers from the northeast of Scotland. They were “a family of giants, 6ft. 3ins,” recalled one friend, “well-read and cultured.”6 Thom called them “solid Keir Hardie socialists … pacifists, anti-Catholics, anti-royalists and Nonconformists.”7 Thom’s grandfather, Alexander, moved with his widowed mother and six siblings from Echt, a crossroads village some twenty miles west of Aberdeen, to Kent’s Medway Valley in 1887. Alexander’s eldest brother, Charles, had seen “the fertile smiling land of Kent” for himself and was the driving force behind their passage south.8 Charles ran Gig Hill Farm, in Larkfield, and each of the younger Thomson brothers subsequently took on their own farms. In 1897, Alexander leased Covey Hall Farm9 in nearby Snodland. The following year, he married a local schoolteacher, Daisy Collings, whom he had met in the congregation of the West Malling Baptist Church.

So dominant were the Thomsons in his life that Thom “never saw much” of his paternal relatives and knew “little about them.”10 The Gunns were also of Scottish heritage. They had moved south earlier than the Thomsons and by the mid-nineteenth century had established a prosperous bakery in the heart of Gravesend.11 Herbert, Thom’s grandfather, chose not to continue the family business, however, and instead joined the mainstay of the Gravesend economy: shipbuilding. He rose from steam engine fitter to chief engineer of the Gordon, a War Office steamer stationed at the Royal Dockyard in Sheerness, and received two medals for service during the First World War.

Thom’s father, Herbert Smith Gunn, known as Bert, was born in April 1903. He was the youngest of three children, and the family lived in a small row house in Sheerness. With their father often at sea, Bert looked up to his older brother, Malcolm, for guidance. In a photograph from his schooldays, Bert looks confident, almost cocky, and sports a slight sneer. Like his father, Bert wanted to make his own way in the world. Leaving Gravesend County School at sixteen, Bert followed Malcolm into a new career that, thanks to the popular press, offered intelligent young people from the provinces more adventure and excitement than ever before: journalism. Every young reporter had the same dream: to make it to Fleet Street.

Charlotte and Bert grew up some fifteen miles apart in Kent, but both saw their futures far away from home. By the 1880s, industry had transformed Snodland from an agricultural village into “Cementopolis,” lined with yellow-gray row houses for workers at the quarries and paper factories.12 Charlotte was “tired of the familiar” and “wanted her life to be grand and interesting. She felt constricted by this ugly overgrown village.” She was bookish—the Thomsons “venerated education”—and reading had expanded her horizons beyond the Medway Valley. A nearby cousin lent her novels by Turgenev and Arnold Bennett; for a time, her favorite novel was The Mill on the Floss. In her late teens she conceived a passion for D. H. Lawrence, whose Brangwen sisters in The Rainbow and Women in Love she envied for their strength and feistiness. She even wrote a Lawrence-influenced novel, now lost, “in which the principal character,” she told Thom, “was called Raven Jean and gave didactic speeches.”13

When Bert started as a cub reporter at the Kent Messenger, he would have seen poems and articles written by “Nan Thomson.” The weekly Messenger was the county newspaper of Kent, with offices in Gravesend and Maidstone. It usually printed one poem per paper, gentle pastoral verse in rhyming couplets by local authors. Charlotte’s poems were more vigorous. Her first was a defense of the flapper:

She had cut her dark hair short, started calling herself Nanette, and acquired what would become a lifelong interest in fashion, but for Charlotte the flapper denoted new levels of independence and rights for women in the aftermath of the First World War. Her poem was aimed at detractors in the national press: a writer for The Manchester Guardian, for example, thought “one of the unfortunate consequences of the war” was that “large numbers of women … had contracted a taste for a spurious kind of independence which led them to seek occupation outside the home.”15 An occupation outside the home was exactly what Charlotte wanted.

A fortnight after her flapper poem, she wrote a parodic article for the Messenger about the kinds of farmers a young woman might encounter at Fair Day. “A new type creeps in among the ranks of the farmer,” she warned.

Having grown up on a farm, the last thing Charlotte wanted was to marry a farmer. She would watch as Barbara married a schoolteacher and Margaret a cement worker. Her teachers at Rochester Grammar wanted her to sit for a university scholarship, but Charlotte, impatient for life to begin, “was eager to escape into adulthood as soon as possible.”17

With her bobbed hair and dark, serious eyes, Charlotte would have made quite an impression on Bert when their paths crossed at the Messenger. She was feisty, could quote D. H. Lawrence, and had a sharp tongue and temper. Bert likely saw her as a challenge. He himself cut a dapper and confident figure, tearing off on his motorcycle between assignments. A photograph depicts him, boyish and suited, astride a motorcycle: Charlotte annotated it “Tom Mix” after the iconic star of early westerns.18 Bert was dashing and erudite. One future friend called him “that prince of good companions and [an] inveterate charmer.”19 Charlotte found him “attractive and ambitious … good-looking and light-hearted,” according to Thom, and “worldly in a way which contrasted with her family’s old-fashioned-ness.” Immediately smitten, Bert wrote her “page after page of love letters, addressing her as Nanetta.” Although Charlotte was “also courted by a local man of some wealth,” Thom reported, “there was never any doubt in her mind that she should marry for love.”20

By early 1925 they were engaged. Both would turn twenty-two that year. Their...