I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn’t read poetry, so if I hadn’t had the chance to experience it at school I’d never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.

Duffy frames her poetic vocation as something discovered rather than inherited: a love of literature sparked in spite of a home without books or a culture of reading. The quote highlights the formative power of state education and individual teachers in widening access to the arts, especially for children without literary capital at home. Her emphasis on memorising poems suggests an early, bodily intimacy with language—rhythm, sound, and voice—that anticipates her later reputation for dramatic monologue and performance-ready verse. It also implicitly argues for poetry as a public good: something that can be encountered, loved, and mastered through teaching, not only through private upbringing.