Wick Green
Petersfield
31 December 1911
My dear Irene and Hugh,
My best thanks to you for a turkey where ‘youth and beauty meet together.’ I think it is a very good substitute for a rocking chair. The only disadvantage of it is that you can never point with satisfaction to it or its effects, after it has once been consumed, unless of course I came out in lumps or spots, or write verses, or good prose, or become a lover of animals, or take to dance and song. I did take to the dance last night. Helen and I went as a country couple to a fancy dress affair. There were a lot of very nice males and females under 20 who made up for my grotesqueness. I had on an old Sussex pedlar’s smock, black hat and red ribbon with a bunch of corn, kneebreeches and grey stockings tied with black ribbons. Helen had a print dress bunched up behind to show a red petticoat and a lot of white stocking, and a sunbonnet on her head. We are now recovering, on a most beautiful morning of sun above a solid mist filling up the valley in rolls like an inverted sky exactly.
The children are away for a few days with the idle rich of Petersfield. So as we have 2 rabbits, you can suppose the turkey is really our own and can rely on a large part of it being turned into E.T. N.B. This is not original but from a poem of de la Mare’s about how All things that Miss T eats Turn into Miss T.
If it turns into anything really interesting I will let you know, or should it incapacitate me for such things, Helen will.
Yours ever with Helen’s love Edward Thomas.
Index of Letters
To Gordon Bottomley
Stow on the Wold
Gloucestershire
22 March 1912
My dear Gordon,
I was very glad indeed when your letter caught me up just as I was starting on a short walk. I had been thinking of you daily wondering whether to write, knowing well you must be ill. It didn’t seem worth while as I was always either busy at Pater and good for nothing else or contending with my usual devils. I was not reborn in Wales. Work is the only thing though when I am at it I don’t invariably realise it especially as it’s always in a hurry. I roughly finished a book on Pater last Sunday: am keeping it by me to tone it down for a few weeks. I am going to write on Swinburne. Probably I told you. I brought away Songs before Sunrise but at the end of a day’s walking can make nothing of it. I am travelling from Cirencester along the Fosse Way to Stratford Warwick and Coventry, where I am to spend a day or two. I did think of rushing up to see you, but the strike and increasing irregularity of trains seems to forbid it. If I don’t come I will send you some of my works but they are very numerous now. I have just corrected proofs of Norse Tales. Borrow, Hearn and Icknield Way impend. Celtic Tales please Mervyn and Bronwen. They are exercises in English, only. I am only just learning how ill my notes have been making me write by all but destroying such natural rhythm as I have in me. Criticising Pater has helped the discovery. But it is too late now, in these anxious and busy times, to set about trying to write better than perhaps I was born to. You have some advantages over me after all. Fancy being able to write those verses for music. I think they have the just nakedness for words to be sung and I wish I could hear them. Tell me who was the foundress. Now if I had any time. No, I will not say what I might — but should not — do if I had time, which is impossible. However, when I have exhausted the books which publishers and I can seem to agree on, — and that will not be very far hence, — I may find myself with Time. Stow on the Wold is perfectly silent after a day of wind and rain, except the choir practising in the church over the way. It is a little stone town on a slope and summit of the Cotswolds and looks far away east over floods and red ploughland. I wish I were not so tired. I will keep this over another day’s walking. Goodnight.
Chance has brought me to Stratford upon Avon where it is evident Shakespeare once lived and is not alive now. I shall leave it to the tradespeople the I am too tired to walk beyond it tonight. I wonder what a man would do here who was not afflicted by the spectacle of trade? It has been a beautiful warm day but I have been walking on my nerves all the time and am fit for bed not letterwriting. ‘Glory to Man in the Highest! for Man is the master of things!’ says Swinburne. I shall have to discover what that amounts to. Can you recommend me to some sane admirer on whom I can sharpen my wits? Somehow I have fallen into a habit of abusing literature for not being what it was never meant to be, and it won’t do me or the public any good I expect, especially as it probably originates in personal disgusts of an irrelevant kind which I ought to be getting over in silence and not in print. Coining everything into hasty words is I suppose the punishment as well as the living of a journalist. Is it lifelong, too?
I wish I had been listening to Rathbone and not a cheap and outworn gramophone. It would have been worth my money, Emily.
Goodbye, and please write as soon as you can.
I am yours and Emily’s ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Walter de la Mare
Dillybrook Farm
Road nr Bath
15 May 1912
My dear de la Mare,
Thank you. I have just looked through your book and half glad half sorry, but more glad. Sorry to think there are so many poems in it I might have seen all these months: glad to think there are so many new ones to read. You won’t suspect me of mere dull ingenious compliments when I confess I have only glanced at the book. The fact is I am writing Swinburne and can’t get free just yet so I shall leave the book to fit in this evening. You won’t mind hearing that Bax admired Miss Loo (and some that I believe you have left out, from the English Review) without being advised to. He lives 8 miles away and I spent Saturday night there. This is delicious country in the sun and now today in misty rain. There is may and nightingales at hand. I wish you could come. I can give you a bed and I believe I could manage Whitsun if you could. Tell me. Otherwise I may not be in town for another month. I am not sure, I am restless here now that I am writing, Many thanks for Saintsbury but to tell the truth I really can’t read him, so I find now. The other book was G M Trevelyan’s Garibaldi book or rather his 2 Italian books. If you could send them this week they would be useful, but don’t trouble to send them later. When I come to town I shall be very glad to come to you if Dick doesn’t mind. You aren’t 40 already are you? No I wasn’t too tired (for myself).
Hodgson will be pleased to see The Cherry Trees again. I am jealous of you for being able to write such unprofitable things. Unprofitable even for me this time, for no one has sent it to me for review. I shall have pleasure without profit for the first time in reading you.
With my love to you all and tell me if perhaps you could come.
Yours ever
ET.
After all I stayed in in the rain and find I have read nearly all your book. You might as well ask me to write a poem myself as to write about them. Each one takes me a little deeper into a world I seem to know just for the moment as well as you — only not really knowing it I can not write. I think it is equal to ‘Songs of Childhood’ and ‘Poems’ together. It is as fresh as the first and it has the grain of the second book like gossamer over its blossom colours. I did not think one book could be so good. My favourite is ‘the Dwelling Place’, if I dare commit myself.
Index of Letters
To Helen
Selsfield House
East Grinstead
16 August 1912
Dearest one,
Here we are waiting for Ellis to turn up. We have been over the garden with Mrs. Ellis and down the deep dark ghyll where they quarried the sandstone hundreds of years ago, now full of hazel and oak. The Ellises are thinking of adding a newer bit to their garden — a square deep hollow with sandmartin’s nests and ragwort, suitable for an outdoor theatre, fives court etc. It is drizzling now, but there is a wood fire in the big open fireplace and Mervyn is deep in cushions and the Chronicle. Our lodgings last night were a great success. We had eggs and fruit for breakf
ast and only paid 5/ — for everything. The people are named Wadey, and if I go to Slinfold again I shall go there.
Ellis arrived at 6 and cut this short. Mervyn sat down and listened to us talking till dinner at 7.30 when he went to bed with a bath.
Well, about Friday, we were again in a district of parks the we did not see so many grand entrances, iron gates, stone pillars surmounted by eagles or suits of armour with no men inside as at Petworth. First we went to see Shelley’s house, Field Place, but only saw that it was there among trees near Broadbridge Heath, a small treeless roadside common halfway to Horsham, with reeds, and a pub nearby called the ‘Dog and Bacon’ and with a big sign of a dog up on a chair sniffing at some bacon that stands beside a mug of beer on a table — obviously the original of Worthington’s ‘What is it master likes so much’ except that here the dog is facing right, which is harder to draw than left.
We didn’t stay long in Horsham which has a square called Carfax as at Oxford. We kept some way on the Brighton road passing close to a beautiful lily mill pond at Whitesbridge in a dark hollow. We turned off at Manning’s Heath, which is like Ashdown, a big region of oak and fir woods cloven by deep valleys, several containing big long ponds — one a Hammer Pond used in the ironworks when wood instead of coal supplied the furnaces and Sussex was almost as black as Staffordshire. Some of the Forest is high and bare and purple for acres with heather and their undulations against a background of wood are lovely. Our road was horseless for a long way, with barbed wire to keep us out of the heather stretches in the east but no hedge on the west where there was oak birch bracken and heather — heather only at the sunny edge. We sat and looked at the view, the barbed wire and our bicycles. Isn’t Coolhurst a nice name? It is a house with a small park and entrance gates just South of Horsham. The nicest flower all the way was the wood betony at the edges of the woods. It looks so wise — a purple flower like basil, but darker, with dark leaves, rather stiff. The combination of oak birch bracken heather and harebell is one of the sweetest.
Then we got to a main road which took us to Crawley — an automobile-yellow town where we bought fruit and which we ate a few miles further on after going into Worth churchyard, a big rough place full of Brookers, Streeters, Ellis, Morris, Davis, Rice, etc., entombed among many trees of yew and lime etc. The church, which has a short Sussex spire and Saxon double windows, was shut. By where some men were cutting up larch wood in Worth Forest we ate our fruit and got to Ellis’ at 3. Meantime my bicycle had gone wrong, and I now find I shall have to borrow Ellis’ to finish the tour, as a cone in the back wheel is broken in half and it may be long before a new one comes from the maker.
Mervyn has gone to Cowden. We sit and smoke and talk. Thank you for your letter. I hope this is not too dull a return for it.
Goodbye. I am ever and wholly yours
Edwy Please keep these letters.
Index of Letters
To Helen
Coulsdon
20 August 1912
Dearest one,
We got here to lunch at 1.45 from Sevenoaks, we found no letters and no proofs, and nothing at Davies’ either. Why?
I told you Mervyn went to Cowden on Saturday and had an afternoon’s roach fishing with the de la Mares. They were too full up for the Ellises to come on Sunday. So we went alone expecting to be put up at the inn but they made shift and we slept in somebody’s bed. We got there at 12.30 without rain but after the 2 o’clock lunch rain fell at intervals and saved us from a Rectory tea. We played pitch and toss etc with the children, led by Hodgson. Tea followed on lunch and then after some languid fishing in a dry interval came dinner. The pond is a little one full of roach by the White Horse on Holtye Common, a gorsy common almost spoilt by golf. The de la Mare’s house is a pleasant new one with varying views of Ashdown Forest, first a gentle meadowslope then a rising wooded ridge with a distant hilltop fir clump eastward and nearer woods more to the West. We talked comfortably about Futurists, animals etc till near midnight. De la Mare was tired and irritable and full of work. The Edinburgh Review has asked him for a quarterly article on recent books. But what am I going to do?
Monday morning was wet when Hodgson left. But we started in sun at 11.15 and soon got among hopgardens and orchards at the Kent border and bought 3d worth of apples and pears at a farm and ate them in the park of Penshurst Place for lunch. The church was shut. The old house and the smooth turf with sheep feeding round a clump of bracken was very pleasant. We sat against one of the limes that stand in lines on either side. Then we went into Tunbridge through Leigh, and I lost my temper because Mervyn wanted ‘something to read’ while I had some coffee — which I didn’t have. We had a hilly ride up and down from Tunbridge mostly through well known country, resting at the Shipborne Inn which has seats in a verandah looking over the gorse and cows of Shipborne Common eastward.
Then through Ivy Hatch and Stone Street (you remember the ‘Rose and Crown’?) to the beautiful shallow valley with beeches on the upper slopes on either side of the road which goes through it — called the Wilderness — to Seal and Sevenoaks. Davies had been expecting us for days, an anxious host. We had tea. Mervyn went out but did not recognize anything or anybody. He listened to us — Davies talking about his Welsh walk — till dark and bed and our supper of fish and stewed plums and undrinkable coolish coffee. By 10.30 I was sleepy and just wrote telling Godwin Baynes I shouldn’t join him at Caermarthen and then to bed. We had to go and see the Littles who were just back. It had rained all night and again at 8.30 after we had a stroll into Knole Park. They thought Mervyn looked strong and well. So he does. But we didn’t communicate much. Little told me Morgan and his wife are legally separated. The Littles are friendly still with both. Morgan is much cut up: probably that accounts for his slackness in answering my proposal for a visit in May. We had a boring talk till 11 which left us little time to get here against a strong West wind. But we had no rain. We went along under the downs by Riverhead, Brasted, Westerham, Limpsfield Common, Oxted, and Godstone and then up across the Pilgrims Way northward over the downs by a Roman road to Caterham and Coulsdon common and windmill and ridiculously thin-spired church round the end of Farthing Down by the big marlpit here. Janet Hooton is childless and servantless and herself goes away on Saturday. We did eat. Mervyn seems none the worse for his 21 miles against the wind before lunch. Now he is reading Ali Baba in an armchair.
The rain has come on again. We have been lucky all along in avoiding the showers. Mrs. Little would like to see you and would motor over if we were a little nearer.
Davies is amassing unread books and talks dully about his purchases and how after all it is surprising what a few standard books there are and 500 will be a sufficient library. The Marlowe I gave him is shaving paper because he has a new copy of the same edition. He has 2 Ben Jonsons if not 3, Whiston’s Josephus, scores of Elizabethans, a hideous volume of British poets in double columns unreadable and never read, Ransome’s Book of Love. He reads the Daily Chronicle. His portrait angs on the wall, a ghastly sight, like an indiarubber coloured horsey publican. He talks of taking his next oliday in Paris to see the orrible vice but is afraid of drugged wine so may put up with Jones.
Please save my review of Wuthering Heights in today’s DC.
The post goes at 4.35. I do hope I shall hear from you tonight and hear that D. is gone. Goodbye. We send our love to you all.
I am all yours (there is not much left)
Edwy.
P.T.O. So far as I know I shall return Ellis’ bicycle (which is a brute) on Thursday and return from there on Friday by train or (if it is ready) by bicycle. But you needn’t send any of Thursday’s letters to Selsfield House, as I shall be home, I hope, before dark on Friday. Please send proofs to Rusham Road if any come tomorrow as I daresay Julian will look through them, though they will be too late for me. This delay won’t please Seeker and I can’t imagine why you haven’t sent them here as I asked you to.
Index of Letters
; To Clifford Bax
13 Rusham Road
Balham
SW
19 September 1912
My dear Clifford,
Thank you for your letter and the pictures. If ever I feel I ought to indulge again in so long and happy a dream as I had at Broughton Gifford I shall come. I could not tell you without painful explanations and contrasts how happy your wife and you and Baynes made me for the whole of the time. I hope I shall see you in town.
Did some letters come for me after I left and were they forwarded here or to Wick Green, Petersfield? Don’t trouble to answer if they did arrive and were forwarded.
Please tell your wife what I think she must know how much I enjoyed myself and how grateful I am.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
I enjoyed Dermot O’Byme very much and shall make an opportunity of saying so.
Index of Letters
To Gordon Bottomley
Wick Green
Petersfield
31 October 1912
My dear Gordon,
Thank you for Emily’s letter. Helen and I were thinking of you and Holmbury just now so I must send you a word. The month has not been good for letters because I have always been either busy or anxious. Now, however, things are a little better and for the moment I see that I can keep going. We have nearly settled to move in the Spring — into a new labourer’s cottage that will just hold us with half our furniture. I may keep my hilltop study but the chances are I shall fix myself alone in London for about half the year. It seems necessary partly to ensure work and partly to give Helen peace, since I am a mere nuisance and a considerable one when I am working and rather worse when I have no work to do. Just now I have got some reviewing again. What is more I have started a fiction! It is a loose affair held together if at all by an oldish suburban home, half memory, half fancy, and a Welsh family (mostly memory) inhabiting it and collecting a number of men and boys including some I knew when I was from ten to fifteen. The scheme allows me to use all memories up to the age of 20 and so far I have indulged myself freely. I feel however that it will be better than isolated essays and sketches, each helping the other, and the same characters reappearing; and more honest than the other pseudo-continuous books I have written. I hope it will get finished or drafted before the year is out.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 38