I expect there will be a letter today. Never think I can do without one any more than you can dearest. Kiss the children for me.
All and always yours
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Helen
Saturday
Beaurains
April 7 or 8 1917
Dearest,
Here I am in my valise on the floor of my dugout writing before sleeping. The artillery is like a stormy tide breaking on the shores of the full moon that rides high and clear among white cirrus clouds. It has been a day of cold feet in the O.P. I had to go unexpectedly. When I posted my letter and Civil Liabilities paper in the morning I thought it would be a bad day, but we did all the shelling. Hardly anything came near the O.P. or even the village. I simply watched the shells changing the landscape. The pretty village among trees that I first saw two weeks ago is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks. But the sun shone and larks and partridges and magpies and hedgesparrows made love and the trench was being made passable for the wounded that will be harvested in a day or two. Either the Bosh is beaten or he is going to surprise us. The air was full of aeroplane flights. I saw one enemy fall on fire and one of ours tumble into the enemy’s wire. I am tired but resting.
Yesterday afternoon was more exciting. Our billet was shelled. The shell fell all round and you should have seen Horton and me dodging them. It was quite fun for me, though he was genuinely alarmed, being more experienced. None of us was injured and our house escaped. Then we went off in the car in the rain to buy things.
We shall be enormously busy now. Rubin goes off tomorrow on a course of instruction and may be a captain before long, our sergeant major has left with a commission. One officer has to be at the O.P. every day and every other night. So it will be all work now till further notice — days of ten times the ordinary work too. So goodnight and I hope you sleep no worse than I do.
Sunday. I slept jolly well and now it is sunshine and wind and we are in for a long day and I must post this when I can.
All and always yours Edwy£$
INDEX OF LETTERS
1896-1899
To James Ashcroft Noble
To James Ashcroft Noble
To Helen
To Harry Hooton
To Helen
To Harry Hooton
To Helen
To Helen
To Helen
1900-1904
To Helen
To Ian MacAlister
To Ian MacAlister
To Ian MacAlister
To Ian MacAlister
To Ian MacAlister
To Jesse Berridge
To Helen
To Ian MacAlister
To Helen
To Helen
To Helen
To Helen
1905-1909
To Jesse Berridge
To Gordon Bottomley
To Walter de la Mare
To Walter de la Mare
To Gordon Bottomley
To Jesse Berridge
To Gordon Bottomley
To C. F. Cazenove
To Walter de la Mare
To Gordon Bottomley
To Harry Hooton
To Walter de la Mare
To Walter de la Mare
To Edward Garnett
To Edward Garnett
To Gordon Bottomley
To Gordon Bottomley
To Gordon Bottomley
1910-1913
To C. F. Cazenove
To C. F. Cazenove
To Gordon Bottomley
To David Uzzell
To W. H. Hudson
To Gordon Bottomley
To Harold Monro
To Harold Monro
To Edward Garnett
To Edward Garnett
To Harry Hooton
To Edward Garnett
To Irene and Hugh McArthur
To Gordon Bottomley
To Walter de la Mare
To Helen
To Helen
To Clifford Bax
To Gordon Bottomley
To Helen
To Helen
To Edward Garnett
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Harry Hooton
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Walter de la Mare
To Robert Frost
To C. F. Cazenove
1914-1915
To Gwili
To Robert Frost
To Clifford Bax
To Robert Frost
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Gwili
To Robert Frost
To Robert Frost
To C. F. Cazenove
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Helen
To Helen
To Robert Frost
To W. H. Hudson
To C. F. Cazenove
To Robert Forst
To Harold Monro
To Margaret Townsend
To John Freeman
To Edward Garnett
To W. H. Hudson
To Robert Frost
To Harry Hooton
To Robert Frost
To Edward Garnett
To his parents
To J. W. Haines
To Robert Frost
1916-1917
To Helen
To Lascelles Abercrombie
To Robert Frost
To Robert Frost
To Helen
To Robert Frost
To Robert Frost
To J. W. Haines
To Robert Frost
To Helen
To Robert Frost
To his parents
To Robert Frost
To his parents
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Helen
To Eleanor Farjeon
To Robert Frost
To Walter de la Mare
To Eleanor Farjeon
To his parents
To his son
To Helen
To his mother and younger brother
To his mother
To Helen
To Robert Frost
To his mother
To Helen
To Helen
The Autobiographies
Battle of Arras, 9th April 1917. Thomas was killed by a shell blast in the first hour of the battle at an observation post whilst directing fire.
British troops returning for a rest following the Battle of Arras, 9th April 1917.
HOW I BEGAN
First published in T.P.’s Weekly, January, 1913
Talking prose is natural to most of the species; writing it is now almost as common, if not as natural; having it published when written is the third step which distinguishes an author from the most primitive minority of mankind. No author, I suppose, except Miss Helen Keller, has varied this method of progress. Every one begins by talking, stumbles into writing, succumbs to print.
The first step is the most interesting and the most difficult to explain and describe. I shall leave it alone. The second step is very interesting, and less difficult to explain and describe, yet I can remember little of it. I can only remark here that the result of teaching a child to read before it can write is that it begins and usually ends by writing like a book, not like a human being. It was my own experience. From the age of one, I could express by words and inflections of the voice all that ever sought expression within me, from feelings of heat, cold, hunger, repletion, indigestion, etc., to subtle preferences of persons and things. But when I came to write the slowness of that unnatural act decimated and disconcerted my natural faculties. I laboriously covered a square foot of notepaper, communicating nothing much beyond the fact that I had begun to hold a pen, and to master English grammar.
That the best of fountain-pens is slow, does not entirely account for the inexpressiveness of that square foot of notepaper. The slowness made it practically impossible to say what I was thinking, even if I had tried. I did not try hard. I do not believe that it w
as by any means my sole or chief aim to write what I was thinking, or what I should have spoken had my correspondent been in the same room with me. I felt it to be highly important that I should use terms such as I had met in books, seldom if ever in speech. Nor do I remember hearing it said that I could, or should, write as I thought or as I spoke.
Until the age of eight or nine, therefore, all my writing was painful and compulsory, and I knew well that it displayed a poorer creature than the severest critic could judge me. But at that age I was given a small notebook in a cover as much like tortoiseshell as could be made for a penny. In this I wrote down a number of observations of my own accord, though I dare say the notebook had been designed as a trap; if there was a separate bait, I have forgotten it. All that I can remember is that I pronounced the houses of Swindon to be ‘like bull-dogs, small but strongly built.’ They were of stone, and I was accustomed to brick. Stone seemed to be a grander material. Hence the note. The sententious form was, no doubt, due to a conscious desire to be impressive, that is to say, adult. It was not the last time I experienced this desire, but I shall not trouble you with more instances.
With short intervals, from that time onwards I was a writer by choice. I began several diaries, carrying on the entries in some of them as far as February. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, I did more; I kept a more or less daily record of notable events, the finding of birds’ nests, the catching of moles or fish, the skinning of a stoat, the reading of Richard Jefferies and the naturalists.
These notes aimed at brevity: they were above syntax and indifferent to dignity. I was not, however, permitted to forget syntax or dignity. I was obliged to write essays on Imperial Federation, the Greek Colonization of Sicily, Holidays, etc., where I gave myself up to an almost purely artistic rendering of such facts as I remembered, and such opinions as I could concoct by the help of memory, fancy, and the radical and the free-thinking influence of home. Thus, like nearly every other child, I virtually neglected in my writing the feelings that belonged to my own nature and my own times of life — an irreparable loss, whether great or not. If I wrote about what really pleased or concerned me, like a walk all day or all night in Wiltshire, I had in view not the truth but the eyes of elders, and those elders clothed in the excess and circumstance of elderliness regularly assumed in the presence of children. I was considered to excel in this form of rhetoric. So seriously, too, did I take myself in it, that from the time I was sixteen I found myself hardly letting a week pass without writing one or two descriptions — of a man, or a place, or a walk — in a manner largely founded on Jefferies’ Amateur Poacher, Kingsley’s Prose Idylls, and Mr. Francis A. Knight’s weekly contributions to the Daily News,’ but doubtless with tones supplied also by Shelley and Keats, and later on by Ruskin, De Quincey, Pater, and Sir Thomas Browne. I had quite a number of temptations to print, and at the age of fifteen easily gave way. At seventeen, some of those descriptions were printed in the Speaker and the New Age, and soon afterwards took the form of a book.
While I was afflicted with serious English composition and English literature, I was reading Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Henty, and travellers, because I loved them; I was also thinking and talking in a manner which owed little to those dignified exercises, though the day was to come when I spoke very much as I wrote. Presently, also, myself and English, as she is taught in schools, came to a conflict, and gradually to a more and more friendly agreement through the necessity of writing long letters daily to one who was neither a schoolboy nor an elder, the subject of the letters being matters concerning nobody else in the world. Now it was that I had a chance of discarding or of adapting to my own purpose the fine words and infinite variety of constructions which I had formerly admired from afar off and imitated in fairly cold blood. There is no doubt that my masters often lent me dignity and subtlety altogether beyond my needs.
Both in these letters and in papers intended for print, I ravaged the language (to the best of my ability) at least as much for ostentation as for use, though I should not like to have to separate the two. This must always happen where a man has collected all the colours of the rainbow, ‘of earthquake and eclipse,’ on his palette, and has a cottage or a gasometer to paint.
A continual negotiation was going on between thought, speech and writing, thought having as a rule the worst of it. Speech was humble and creeping, but wanted too many fine shades and could never come to a satisfactory end. Writing was lordly and regardless. Thought went on in the twilight, and wished the other two might come to terms for ever. But maybe they did not and never will, and, perhaps, they never do. In my own case, at any rate, I cannot pronounce, though I have by this time provided an abundance of material for a judgment.
THE CHILDHOOD OF EDWARD THOMAS
A FRAGMENT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
CONTENTS
I. INFANCY
II. FIRST SCHOOLDAYS
III. HOLIDAYS
IV. BOOKS AND SCHOOL FRIENDS
V. SCHOOL GAMES AND EARLY READING
VI. PLAYFELLOWS AND SWINDON EXPERIENCES
VII. ANOTHER NEW SCHOOL
VIII. BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND PIGEONS
IX. A LASTING ACQUAINTANCE: RICHARD JEFFERIES
X. PUBLIC SCHOOL: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I. INFANCY
When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands, and I have heard the voice of one singing as I sat or lay in her arms; and I have become again aware very dimly of being enclosed in rooms that were shadowy, whether by comparison with outer sunlight I know not. The songs, first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on this side of it also. I was, I should think, a very still listener whom the music flowed through and filled to the exclusion of all thought and of all sensation except of blissful easy fullness, so that too early or too sudden ceasing would have meant pangs of expectant emptiness. The one song which, by reason of its repetition or of some aptitude in me, I well remember, was one combining fondness with tranquil if peevish retrospective and regret in a soft heavy twilight. I reach back to it in that effort through a thousand twilights lineally descended from that first one and from the night which gave it birth. If I cried or suffered pain or deprivation in those years nothing remains to star the darkness. Either I asked no question or I had none but sweet answers. I was at peace with life. Indoors, out of the sun, I seem never to have been troubled by heat or cold strong enough to be remembered. But out of doors, somewhere at the verge of the dark years, I can recall more simply and completely than any spent indoors at that time one day above others. I lay in the tall grass and buttercups of a narrow field at the edge of London and saw the sky and nothing but the sky. There was some one near, probably a servant, necessary but utterly insignificant. I was alone and happy to be so, just as indoors I was happy among people and shadows between walls. Was it one day or many? I know of no beginning or end to it; but an end I suppose it had an age past.
Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school. There were some boys and more girls whom I desired and sometimes struggled to sit next; and at least two whom I avoided. One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of ‘Lizzie’; the other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull. Of the mistresses I can see a tallish one, with pink complexion, high cheekbones and sleek light brown hair, whose home was a confectioner’s shop, so that it happened that she gave away sweets for slight merits; one dark and shorter, more likeable and hateable; and a stout, short, bustling head mistress in whom I never knew of anything but her appearance to prove her
common humanity with the children and other teachers. I learnt easily: perhaps my memory would record the sweets I earned but not the punishments, nor yet the morning and afternoon labours, whether well or ill performed, of five days in the week. I had no elder brother, and the younger ones of three and one were not yet old enough to accompany me; if I had any friend with whom I walked or trotted home, embraced and embracing as I see children now, I have forgotten. Not that I was lonely, but that I was stung with no intense delight by company, nor with pain by lack of it. I knew boys and girls in several of the streets parallel to ours or crossing it. One or more of them was with me when I found myself somehow on the forbidden side of a black fence which divided the back gardens of one street from a meadow and cut short another street; there were trees and cows in the meadow, and a small pond not far from the fence. With one of these friends, a girl, I went home once and in her back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias and smelt bitter crushed stalks in plucking them. As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless. Why some children, whether my equals or old enough to protect me, were pleasant, and how, I cannot say. Their faces are invisible to me all except one: I can say only that some were fat and the eyes narrow, and that some girls had dark hair, others fair. The one that I can see has black curly hair, dark eyes and cherry lips; and she is smiling: her name was Tottie Armour. We picked sorrel leaves and ate them among the gorse bushes on Wandsworth Common. A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were ‘hills’ to us, who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them. Equal to them in height and steepness, and almost equal as playing grounds, were the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street, one winter. I remember the look of many of the streets, but as not a year has since gone by without my seeing them it is probably not their very early look, save in perhaps a few cases. The first was when I stood by the beerhouse at the bottom of one of them and watched what was happening fifty yards up in the roadway. A mad dog had run into one of the narrow front gardens and lay just inside the railings; a man on the other side with a pickaxe was about to kill the dog; and a small crowd had collected in the roadway. I do not know that I saw the blow struck, but the idea of sharp heavy steel piercing the shaggy hair, flesh and bone of a living creature has remained horrible and ineffaceable every since. Another street which I seem to recall as it was then and as it soon afterwards ceased to be was one leading to Clapham Junction Station. It consists of a low inn with a red painted board up and a row of old dark small cottages mostly with longish front gardens and low wooden fences and a rustic outmoded look inspiring a sort of curiosity and liking as well as some pity or contempt.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 49