Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  I was not better than anyone else at running, jumping, or swimming. In the sports I entered only for the walking and the swimming race. As I never learnt to dive I had to jump in, and arrived last in the swimming race. But I fancied myself at walking; and John and George had spread reports about my performances and I started at scratch with a dozen boys in front of me. All of them were behind in a quarter of a mile or so, except one, and him I was just passing. His five yards’ start had all along seemed to me unfair. However, he was done with; so was the boy who notoriously ran. But their footsteps and their panting sounded close behind, I had enjoyed catching up and walking through the others. Still more I hated being pursued. Soon after George began to run beside me, and when I was within a hundred yards of the tape, I began to believe that the running boy was gaining on me. I could not stand it. Turning off the track I threw myself down on the grass on the pretext that I had a stitch. A master came up and looked at me, saying they had expected me to win. I was wretched. The only worse thing possible was to have been beaten. But nobody else thought so. My father blamed me for cowardice, and for years after used to say to me at intervals on various occasions: ‘Ah well, it’s no use, I suppose. It’s just that mile race over again.’

  ‘Half-mile,’ said I: it was the only answer. Secretly I was as well pleased with the tragic singularity as I could have been with victory. Moreover, I always firmly believed that no boy could beat me in fair walking without a crowd.

  VIII. BUTTERFLIES, MOTHS AND PIGEONS

  I was soon all but indifferent to games. When I entered the school I was an entomologist who had specimens of the yellow underwing and the magpie and the common white butterfly. It may have been a year later that I met a boy who made me ashamed of this ignorance, and helped to set me on another path out of doors. Hearing that he had a collection of moths and butterflies and was selling his duplicates and charging one penny for a swallow-tail, I ordered one. I expected the majestic swallow-tail butterfly. What came was the almost untailed mediocre moth. I handed over the penny without a murmur, for fear of betraying my ignorance. I do not know how we became intimate in spite of this. John was a handsome fair boy, delicate complexioned, dimpled at cheek and chin, of regular large features, strong but not a cricketer or footballer, and for that reason an object of some slight degree of contempt from me and far more from George. George, in fact, mistaking for girlishness John’s delicate skin and better manners, warned me against him. For a time I hesitated between the two. Or it is more truthful to say that I receded slowly away from George to John? Henceforward I merely had George for company to school: with John I spent many evenings and most of my half-holidays. I was more at his house than he at ours. His was larger and we were perfectly free there: also I had some shame of our slightly inferior social position or what I believed to be such, for his speech seemed to me more refined, his manner was freer and more generous than mine, his elder brother was at a great public school, and wore a silk hat on Sundays, he had more money to spend, several of his relatives lived in great big houses. Indoors and here and there in Surrey I rapidly learnt the names and seasons of most common moths and butterflies. I learnt to catch and kill and display them in the orthodox manner. To acquire all the tools of the trade I begged from my father and mother and bartered with everyone. The little round pill boxes made of thin wooden chips, of three or four different sizes one within the other, delighted me as a novelty: so did the neat cork-lined boxes that closed so softly and tightly... and everything else in turn. I was in a terrible hurry to be abreast with John. To spend and to get were the things. An ancient glass case of moths and decoratively mingled butterflies in a second-hand shop seemed the most desirable thing in the world — till I had paid for it and opened it and saw that all the specimens were only so much coloured dust, and faded at that. What I could not catch at once I must buy from John or from a wonderful ‘naturalist’ at a shop. At intervals too I made my own necessaries, fitting a lining of cork into boxes and covering it with white paper, and so on, too hastily to do it well, yet learning or educating some degree of lightness and skilfulness with the fingers.

  In the summer evenings we searched gardens and shrubberies for moths and caterpillars. On Wednesday and Saturday afternoons now we used to go to Wimbledon Common. Or if we had a whole holiday we took a train to Barnes station and walked through Richmond Park over Ham Common to One Tree or Teddington lock, to fish in the Thames. For I was very soon far from being a stern-spirited collector out of doors. I might go out with nothing in view except butterflies, but the moving to and fro among quiet places in the warm weather was the substantial part of the pleasure. Fishing after a time was more to my taste. The infinite possibilities of a river containing pike, barbell and trout fascinated me; I liked the silence; failure never bored me, but on the contrary the last minutes of fading light were intensely exciting. I think I was usually the most impatient of conversation or other interruption, the last to give way under steady lack of incident. When we did give way we used to try casting our lines to the farthest possible distance, or we kept pretending to have bites and struck ferociously so that our lines flew up high into the air, or we used ridiculous baits, until at last our tackles became entangled, or one lost his temper, sulkily packed up and went off alone, to wait, however, at no long distance. We had no great success in the Thames. The most alluring thing that ever happened to me there was hooking a fish of inestimable size which got away with my hook in its mouth. But the walk there and back was never tiring. On the outward journey I think expectation would have carried me through nothing but streets: the long turf stretches of Richmond Park broken by ponds and copses and islanded by great single trees and clusters were pure additional delight as we talked of the chances of sport or weather or whistled the current popular songs. The little rustic cottages at Ham Common beyond, and the very old man sitting outside one of them were always a welcome sight. The broad green-edged river and the swans were enough to fill my eyes for six or seven hours on end, with an interval for bread, cheese, apples and ginger beer. The men towing pleasure boats and brushing down the riverside grass and bushes with their ropes were the only nuisance. Going home we filled our creels and pockets, in the season, with horse chestnuts from wayside trees. As I remember having half a dozen different companions on these expeditions I believe that others found it more dull.

  John and I talked endlessly about our sport and about the implements, of which we got, with every obtainable penny, far more than it was necessary or even possible to use, and about the extraordinary catches recorded in the fishing books and newspapers. Politics we tried not to touch because John was a staunch Conservative. He was, however, less firm as a churchman and I experienced some of my first (and last) pride of argument in impugning the immortality and even the existence of the soul. At this moment I know the place where I proved it impossible that man should have a soul unless the animals had one also, or rather that if he had one he had acquired it on the upward course of evolution. Having read Darwin’s Descent of Man I was sure that men were but animals advanced by exceptional stages from a common level with other animals. At what moment then, said I to John, had the soul entered man? We were walking with great strides along Northcote Road in the gaslight, carrying bags of seed for our pigeons. I thought myself a discoverer and was much elated at being unanswerable except out of the Bible, a work of men, in some ways ignorant men. Yet as I was not interested in the soul except out of dislike for religious people who talked about it, I did not inquire further. This intellectual level was not one which we frequented. Personal talk was, of course, our staple, discussing the abilities and pretensions of other boys, laughing over such follies as that of the boy who assured us that he knew ‘a nest of Red Admiral butterflies’ at Wimbledon — this picturesque technical slip we continually brought up for ridicule. We were not inventive boys. At most perhaps for the sake of vividness or glory we would relate an experience we had heard of and claim it for our own. I remember pretending to ha
ve seen a naked girl in a copse near Swindon. Of my grandmother’s cottage I used to speak as if it were the same rank as the houses of John’s uncles and aunts. I was guilty of no single great untruth or calculated misrepresentation, but I spoke of the ivy on the cottage walls with a desire that it should be understood to be a considerable mass and expanse, and of leaning out of my bedroom window to reach a nest as if there were a respectable number of other windows, instead of only three altogether. My comparatively wealthy distant relations were not omitted from the picture which I was creating. If my cousins at the Herefordshire vicarage had a donkey or a pony to ride, I took the liberty of referring to their horses and stables. And, of course, when I heard that my uncle had taken part in the fighting against Lobengula and the Matabele, I magnified the splendour which I really conceived: I had always been careful to speak of him as an engineer not as a fitter. It was easy for me to slip into a course of lying. Thus I once suffered from constipation and my mother knew of it; but for a day or two afterwards I asserted, when asked, that I was still suffering.

  I did not, however, dream of throwing up the companions whom I did not want to introduce John to. For example, I always went out if possible to Henry’s whistle. Other boys who had met me with him had referred scornfully to Henry. Jonathan had asked me, ‘Who was that low-bred fellow you were with?’ But then Jonathan had very subtle rules of gentility. Once he met me while I was at my third school and he also left the school we had attended together, and on hearing where I now went he remarked, ‘Oh, that is quite a cad’s school.’ I liked to feel the equals of these squeamish boys without looking down except in temporarily affected contempt on their inferiors. So I used to enjoy going about with Henry to look at the pigeon shops in Wandsworth, Battersea and Clapham, occasionally to visit the back-garden lofts of working men in the same neighbourhoods. He had me in tow and I think I remained for the most part silent in the background unless I had a bird to buy. These long rambles among crowds of working people under the gaslight, in all sorts of weathers, were a great pleasure and were interrupted by a greater one when we stood and looked at pigeons in an atmosphere of shag smoke, grain and birds. At one time I paid a good many visits to the lofts of a tradesman in our neigbourhood, a tall gross pale-faced dark man with a truculent geniality. He was said to ill-treat the small wife who did most of the shop work and to be going under an assumed name for some bad reason. John would never have endured him: if he had to deal with men below him he preferred gamekeepers and such like who had to be tipped and knew their place. But the man kept scores of long-distance homing pigeons. Their high circlings visible from our back garden, and their rushing lower flight between the chimney-pots, were sublime to me. It was a great day therefore when I went round to him to get the pair of young black chequers which I had been awaiting for many days. I was to have them, so I understood, for two-and-six the pair. When I already had them in my hands I learnt that they were two-and-six each. This was beyond my means, nor did I want to have one of them at such a price. So he took them back into his hands at the door. Then while I was still lingering he put the head of one bird in his mouth, as I imagined in fun, or to slip a grain into its beak. His teeth closed on the slender neck tighter and tighter, the wings flapped and quivered, and when he opened his jaws the bird was dead. I was speechless, on the edge of tears. He looked down at me with a half-pitying grin, remarking that I was ‘still soft-hearted’. My tenderness turned to hatred for the man, yet I could not speak. I dared not show my feeling. With only a meek resentfulness I even accepted his gift of the surviving bird. It became the prize of my pigeon house, always distinguished as ‘the young homer’. The man I never did more than nod to again.

  It was Henry, too, who introduced me to much better company, a family with half a dozen boys who let him keep his main store of pigeons in their back garden. An unlocked side door admitted the most distant connections of the Joneses or of their friends to the back garden. It was practically never without some of the boys and their friends or hangers-on, their dogs, their pigeons or Henry’s. The house itself was scarcely more sacred. The boys’ rooms, and dark library lined with books and littered with magazines and newspapers, were freely invaded. The elder boys, who went neither to school nor to work, were always indoors or in the garden when they were not training for athletic sports. The younger boys were licensed truants, getting to bed or to breakfast at all hours. The father, an unemployed mysterious professional man with a long coat and a cigar, looked dubiously cheerful, reigning rather than ruling, but treated with respectful familiarity. Mrs. Jones, sadly tolerant, was busy chiefly indoors. The chief attraction for me was the family collection of birds’ eggs from the moorland and seashore of Wales. The curlew, the henharrier, the buzzard, belonged to a past which to me was romantic. For the present they had to be contented with the fields and copses of Merton for a hunting ground. I was free to go in and out of the house and garden, a very humble follower and admirer of their free idle ways. One of them taught me to ride a bicycle. Sometimes one joined me in a walk to Merton. For a wet or an unoccupied afternoon I had the garden and the roomy pigeon house, only a few minutes’ walk from home, as an easy resource. But John never went there with me, nor did any of my other school friends. I was not intimate with any of the boys. In fact John was my one constant friend. We had become essential to one another. We quarrelled and differed, of course, but one quarrel only lasted in my memory and that because John sent me a note next morning at school, saying: ‘I was a cad. Will you make it up?’ I kept the paper for years afterwards.

  I did not make friends easily, perhaps because I was exacting. I wanted someone who would be ever ready for an afternoon and evening of walking or talking, and I think I wanted to have the upper hand and to have it easily. With me, to think of a walk to Merton or a tour among the shops in Battersea meant to do it immediately, and I could usually get John to accompany me. So we were separated hardly at all except in the holidays.

  I remember the summer holiday when I was fourteen. My two next brothers and I spent two or three weeks with four boys and a girl whom my mother’s sister was looking after during their parents’ absence in India. We took the train journey alone, enjoying most the change at Templecombe and the wait which we spent in hunting butterflies near the station. It was at Burnham in Somerset that we stayed. The eldest boy was entering Sandhurst, the next two were at the public school which he had just left. They were comparatively wealthy people and their ways were different from ours or even John’s family. My aunt was careful to instruct us in the use of fish knives. The boys’ slang delighted and impressed me. But I made no friends among them. My next brother, a franker, more athletic boy, was the favourite, and was often mildly in league with them against me. The eldest boy despised me. He made me conscious of being shy, timid and sneaking; and, if I was naturally that, I must have been far more so among people whom I could not be free with, partly at least because I was so anxious not to show my more awkward manners and all that they betokened. Nevertheless I had many pleasures there. I began to learn to swim in the sea. I chased the clouded yellow butterflies which I now saw for the first time, among the sandhills. I fished with the others out in the mud flats at a river mouth, above all in a big pond inland, a long pond, with a margin downtrodden by bathers and others at one end, but a steeper bushy bank overshadowed by trees in places at the other. Here I caught eels and perch, and one day pulled to the very edge, and then lost, the biggest perch I had ever seen. After this excitement I should have been content to spend all my days bedside this pond. But the other boys drew me with them half unwillingly on other expeditions, inland, or along the shore, or in boats. When we quitted the pond at evening we had sport out of a big deserted house by throwing stones at the surviving window-panes.

  My next brother stayed on a week or so after I left these people for Swindon. There I was delighted to find the clouded yellow butterflies as plentiful as by the sea. I gave more time to butterflies in those weeks because I had no
w made friends with a Swindon boy who was very little of a fisherman. We chased the butterflies; we jumped the narrow brooks; we trespassed hither and thither with a St. Bernard puppy who drew after us all the cattle in the fields and provoked the farmer; we sat talking in the crown of a pollard willow. Fred was something of an athlete and we ran and jumped in friendly rivalry in the fields. I could beat him only at walking. I never met the boy of anything like my own age whom I could not beat at walking. So I stamped the dust furiously from one milestone to another towards Wootton Bassett in the hope of some day covering the mile in less than seven minutes. Also as I now had an old bicycle with me, we raced on bicycles. The great feats of the big boys at his school were always on my companion’s lips. But in spite of all this, I made a poor show when next I had a chance of using my fists. Two of Fred’s schoolfellows were now pursuing the dark bushy-haired girl whom I used to walk about with. In fact, I am not sure that pursuit was necessary. However it was, I jeered at her, and one of them was keen for a quarrel. One day as I stood fishing alone, with Fred somewhere in the field behind, hidden by the canal-side hedge, this boy came up beside me. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, put himself in attitudes of offence and defense, clenched his fist close to my face, taunted me, did everything but strike me. He was a smaller boy than I, active, stout and ruddy, and at that time as fiery as I was cold. I do not think I was afraid of him, but I certainly was not ready to fight. I wanted to fish; I was in the wrong; Fred in the background, at least as much his friend as mine, added to my discomfort. During the whole scene I do not think I took my eyes off my float or ceased to hold out my rod horizontally. In the end my enemy left me to enjoy my shame. Fred came up from behind the hedge, and I made my explanations. The fact is that, not having been prepared for a quarrel, I could not get free enough from thought about the whole affair and the circumstances of the moment to fight. Thenceforward I never fought, never once pitted my strength, skill and courage seriously against an opponent. I boxed very little, I toyed with singlesticks and foils, only once or twice did I wrestle with John until I fell on him or under him.