Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  Perhaps we went away for a part of each summer holiday. If we did, I have forgotten. We went several times to stop with my father’s mother at Swindon, and once at least to Brighton on a Sunday. At Brighton the shops were shut. It seemed very much like London. The close smell of meat steam in a restaurant where we had dinner will not altogether vanish. I went out in the Skylark and was sick.

  III. HOLIDAYS

  Swindon was a thousand times better. It was delicious to pass Wantage, Challow, Uffington, Shrivenham, to see the 75th, 76th mile marks by the railwayside, to slow down at last to the cry of ‘Swindon’ and see my grandmother, my uncle or my aunt waiting. My aunt was an attendant in the refreshment bar, and sometimes gave me a cake or sandwich to eat amid the smell of spirits, or took me to the private apartments, talking in a high bright voice and showing me round to various other neat women in black with high bright voices and nothing but smiles and laughs. My uncle was a fitter in the Great Western Railway works and knew everybody. He was tall, easygoing, and had a pipe in his mouth and very likely a dog at his heels. I was proud to be with him as he nodded to the one-legged signalman and the man with a white apron and a long hammer for tapping the wheels of all the carriages.

  The look of the town pleased me altogether. I could think no ill of houses built entirely of stone instead of brick, especially as they seemed to exist chiefly to serve as avenues by which I happily approached to my grandmother’s. It was for me a blessed place. The stonework, the flowers in the gardens, the Wiltshire accent, the rain if it was raining, the sun if it was shining, the absence of school and schoolmaster and most ordinary forms of compulsion — everything was paradisal. Nor room ever was as cosy as my grandmother’s kitchen. Its open range was always bright. There was a pair of bellows frequently in use. A brass turnspit hung from under the mantelpiece. The radiant steel trivet was excellent in itself but often bore a load of girdle cakes or buttered toast or more substantial things. An old brown earthenware teapot stood eternally upon the hob. Tea-caddies, brass candlesticks, clay pipes and vases full of spills, stood on the mantelpiece. On its walls hung coloured engravings entitled ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’ and painted in England some time before the Fall, and photographs of me and Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinets and Mr. Gladstone, of Belle Bilton, and of an uncle who had died long before I was born. There were chairs and there was an old mahogany table piano at one side. The smell of ‘Westward Ho’ tobacco hung about the room. My uncle got us chatting instantly. He seemed grown up, yet a boy, by the way he laughed, whistled and sang a bit of a gay tune. At supper, with our bread and cheese, or cold bacon, or hot faggots, or chitterlings, and pickles, he would now and then give us a little tumbler, or ‘tot’, of ale.

  My grandmother being all important, omnipotent, omnipresent if not omniscient, she stood out less. She marketed, cooked, cleaned, did everything. She made pies with a pastry a full inch thick, and many different undulant fruit tarts on plates. Above all, she made doughy cakes, of dough, allspice and many raisins, which were as much better than other cakes as Swindon was better than other towns, and always as much better than other so-called doughy cakes. She knew, too, where to get butter which taught me how divine a thing butter can be made. On the other hand, she was a Conservative and a churchwoman. Without her, these holidays would have been impossible, and she gave me countless pleasures. But if I loved her it was largely because of these things, not instinctively or because she loved me. She was marvellously kind and necessary but we were never close together; and, when there was any quarrel, contempt mingled with my hate of her inheritance from semi-rural Wales of George the Fourth’s time. She was bigoted, worldly, crafty, narrow-minded, and ungenerous, as I very early began to feel. She read her Bible and sang hymns to herself, sometimes in Welsh. She also sang Welsh songs that were not hymns, in particular one that an old beggar used to sing at Tredegar when she was a girl, something about a son whom the mother was begging not to be married. When she wanted to warn me against going fishing some miles off with a strange man she hinted that he might be Jack the Ripper.

  She first took me to church. Clad in those uncomfortable clothes, I walked beside her, who looked more uncomfortable in her layers of black. I felt that everyone enjoyed being stiff, solemn, black, except myself. On entering the church she bent forward to pray, dragging me down with her to blur my sight for a similar period. I rose with an added awkwardness in gazing at the grim emotionless multitudes of hats, bonnets, and bare heads. It was an inexplicable conspiracy for an hour’s self-torture. The service was a dreary discomfort in which the hymns were green isles. When all was over, we crept with a shuffle, a pause, a shuffle, a pause, out to the tombstones and the astonishing fresh light. I was introduced to other women and discussed. I was always being told how like my mother I was and how tall for my age. My grandmother took me to several old Welshwomen, and they all said, ‘He’s a regular — .’ They used to remark how well my father was doing, my grandfather who had long been dead having only been a fitter. To hide something from me, they spoke in Welsh. Sometimes I was more elaborately shown off. Behind a shop smelling of bacon, butter and acid sweets, I stood up before a stout woman smelling a little less strongly of the same, to recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. My reward was a penny or a screw of sweets. The only visit of this kind which I enjoyed was to a farmhouse a mile away, though I can only recall the walk, the various gates, the best parlour with a Bible in the window between the lace curtains, and the glass of warm milk. Between her and my uncle who kept the house going I saw much bickering. Spending most of his evenings out at club or public-house, he neglected the garden and I dare say other things. I dimly knew that he was usually courting a farmer’s daughter somewhere a few miles out, not always the same one. Sometimes when I was walking with him the girl appeared and joined us and at twilight I returned alone.

  The little ivy-covered house, therefore, though I enjoyed the meals and evenings there, was above all a convenient centre for games and rambles. In my earlier visits the rambles of any length were on a Sunday with my uncle. He and I and usually my next brother who was two years younger would set out after a late breakfast. The Club was the first stop. It seemed to be full of grown men in a good temper and very much like schoolboys over their ale, their pipes of shag or ‘Westward Ho’, their Reynolds News. My uncle would tell them a little about us. They chaffed us. The men talked or whispered. Then before we were really impatient my uncle drained his glass and we got on to the canal-side of the town, not without greetings or a word or two from men lounging in their backgardens over their vegetables, their fowls and pigeons. We kept to the canal for a mile or two, and sometimes another man joined us. The roach played in the deep green streams among the reeds, many of them bigger than any fish we had ever caught, here and there a monster. Better still my uncle would discover a long thin jack close inshore as if anchored. If it did not shoot out with a kick and a swirl of water my uncle probably aimed at it with a stone. One great jack excited us by leaping again and again out of the water, at times so near the bank that we made sure he was ours. But the chief Sunday sport was with water rats. We were fascinated as men yelled encouragements, threats, advice, or praises, and a terrier swam down a rat in spite of its divings. When no dog was handy a rat surprised in mid-stream was a good mark for a stone, a snake’s head a more difficult one. The moorhens in the reeds had no more mercy from them, but more often than not escaped. A dead dog was a good deal better than nothing. Not that we were unhappy without something for a mark. We threw flat stones to make ducks and drakes along the sunny water, or sheltering from rain under one of the low stone bridges plunged heavy stones with all our might down into the black depth.

  Alongside the canal were many narrow copses of oak with underwood of ash and willow, the resorts of lovers and gamblers. The pleasantest thing I ever did in them at that time was to peel rings off the bark of a willow stick, in imitation of a carter’s brass-ringed whip. My uncle taught us. He could also fashion a whistl
e by slipping the bark whole off a section of willow, but I never could. Or he made a ‘cat’ or ‘catty’ by tapering both ends of a round stick six inches long. Hit at one end by a downward blow from a longer stick the cat rose spinning up into the air and had then to be slashed horizontally as far as possible. My uncle could play tipcat better than any boy. In these copses or in the hedges or roadside trees, as we went along, he pointed out the nests.

  And then at one o’clock after another visit to the Club, home to a dinner of lamb, green peas, and mint-sauce, followed by rhubarb tart and custard.

  Perhaps it was a little later that I first went out fishing with my uncle. He had not the patience of a fisherman. But there was nothing he did not know: the very winch that he used was made in the factory surreptitiously. He caught roach, and before long I followed him. Even better than this was the sport of seeing him confound the water bailiff who asked for his licence. What with gay lies, chaff and threats, the man had to go. We feared nothing at my uncle’s side.

  These, however, were special week-end delights, for Saturday afternoons or Sundays. The rest of the week was spent mainly in the streets, on the canal-side adjacent, and in the nearer meadows. I liked seeing the thousands of men going by on pavement and roadway for ten minutes before work started and after it ended at the factory. The variety of staid men and jaunty men, old men and boys, tall and stocky men, the frowners and the smilers, fascinated me with endless indolent inarticulate half-conjectures; and suddenly out of the multitude my uncle — or for a moment once or twice a man extremely like him. Straight out of that mysterious pageant, the one positively and entirely living one, he used to come into the house, into the kitchen, into his chair and begin to eat.

  The slower thinner weekly procession to market was the other great sight. Curious wizened old men with old hats, enormously stout women with shawls and black bonnets, smiling rosy ones with feathers, drove by. Their little carts were laden with eggs, butter, fowls, rabbits, and vegetables, from Lydiard and Shaw and Parton and Wootton Bassett. One or two always stopped at our gate, and the woman came to the door with a broad flat basket of eggs or butter under a cloth, and very rarely, some mushrooms. She said, ‘Good morning. How are you this morning? Got your little grandson here again. Nice weather we’re having. Mustn’t grumble. Yes, the butter’s one-and-two now—’ While my grandmother went for her purse I stood at the open door and looked at the shrewd cheerful woman or at her dog who had come for a moment from under the cart. She with her cheerful and shrewd slow way was as strange and attractive as any poet’s or romancer’s woman became afterwards, as far away from my world. I never knew her name, nor did she use ours.

  I very soon knew a score of boys living near. I could tell them about London and share with them the young carrots stolen from my grandmother’s garden. I got some credit with them by telling them that at home we got our coal a ton at a time; for they were all sons of fitters or even labourers at the factory, earning smaller salaries than my father. They in turn taught me their speech and their games. The best game was an evening one, called Urkey. One boy who was Urkey stood still by a tin can while the others hid. When a shout told that they had found a hiding he went in search of them. His object was to see one and run home to the can, crying ‘I Urkey Johnny Williams’. If the one thus singled out, or any other, could get to the can first and kicked it away, the game began all over again. Otherwise the one successfully Urkied had to take his place at the can. We used to have eggs boiled brown in coffee grounds at Easter, and to wear an oak-spray on May 29, ‘Oak Apple Day’. In August we went together to the Fête in the Park and had a bag of cake, and tickets for roundabouts.

  But my strongest and most often considered memory of this period was my second visit to Wales at the age of nine. It is associated with an incident which preceded and almost frustrated it. One evening after tea I went up on to Wandsworth Common with some bigger boys and sat on the seat by the Box Pond. A cigar was produced, lit and given to me to smoke. A few minutes afterwards I was crawling down the road by giddily clinging to the railings of garden after garden. I slunk into the house neglecting my mother’s question ‘What’s the matter?’ but soon answering it by deeds not words. My father said that I should not go to Wales. Nevertheless, I went. I remember the names of the stations, ‘Risca’, ‘Cross Keys’... I walked through a park among great trees that stood at stately distances from one another: there were long-horned shaggy cattle about. I saw the river Ebbw racing over stones, and mountain ash trees on rough rising ground. I saw chimneys and smoke and ruins and whitewashed walls. I stopped at Abertillery with friends and met Welsh people who spoke no English. Above all I remember a house alone on a hill with a parrot and a dark girl named Rachel, pretty and dirty, who was down on her knees scrubbing the kitchen hearth. I made friends with the boy and the girl of the house in Abertillery and played with them among rolls of stuff in a dark shop. With my mother I drove out along a road among trees and above running water to Pontypool. I went to Aberbeg.... That is all the stuff of an abiding memory. These things joined forces with the street in Caerleon, the river and the Round Table, and also with phrases and images from The Adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, and a curious illusion of a knight with a shield kneeling at the foot of a pillar in the photograph at home of Tintern Abbey.

  When I returned to London and school and a question was asked about a Welsh town beginning, the teacher hinted, with Aber, I frantically raised my hand muttering Abertillery, Abertillery, sorely distressed at being unnoticed, at being positively rebuked with Aberdare, which I had never heard of. But a nucleus had been formed, to which I gradually added fact and legend, the legend, e g., I know not how true, that an ancestor, a sea-captain, riding home from Neath with money killed a man who set upon him to rob him.

  At about this time I went to stay at my great-uncle’s house at Limpley Stoke: it may, in fact, have been part of the same holiday which took me to Wales. The deep husky voice out of my uncle’s beard, the goat in the garden who playfully butted the old man and drove me down the steps of the area, a story of a pet monkey who burst and died from overeating, and a vision of pale quarries, are the absurd total of my recollection. After the visit my uncle sent me a French Dilectus with the hope that I should soon master ‘the French genders’.

  I was now comparatively good at lessons, enjoyed excelling, only once played truant and did not enjoy it, was hardly ever caned, and earned a leather-bound gilt-edged New Testament as a prize. And at home I read many books of travel, natural history and fiction. As birthday or Christmas presents I received The Compleat Angler; The Marvels of the Polar World, about ice, snow, Esquimaux and seals, and other books containing picturesque descriptions of torrid or frozen lands; Dick’s Holidays and what he did with them, an adult’s chronicle of a boy’s country holiday, with insidious information on every page; Hans Andersen, Grimm, Holme Leigh’s Fairy Tales, The Swiss Family Robinson, Westward Ho!... Thus I grew to think of places where jaguars lay in wait for men upon overhanging branches and of times when houses were made of barley sugar and witches cooked children and ate them. I was still well content to remain, except during these readings, a citizen’s son of London in the ‘eighties of the nineteenth century, but a citizen with a sometimes fantastically light grasp of facts, as when I slipped a letter addressed to my father in one part of the country inside a newspaper for my mother in another part. Part of the pleasure of a book was still, I think, the strangeness of words as well as things. Thus I was arrested by the quaintness of Izaak Walton’s spelling, as in ‘pearch’ for perch, of his archaic names such as ‘luce’ for pike, of unfamiliar personal names like those of the travellers Speke and Grant, as well as by the nasty horror of Africans eating fat torn from a live human body in Sir Samuel Baker’s book. These things were no less and no more remote than the fairy tales. I did not often feel that they were part of my world of newspapers, a comfortable home and a clockwork school. But several houses became associated with certain w
onders out of books, either by accident or because at some point they resembled places in the books. The gravelly shore of the Long Pond on Wandsworth Common was confused in my mind with the sea sand where Robinson Crusoe saw the cannibals’ footprints. In return, there were people and houses without associations possessing qualities in common with the people and houses in wonderful books, and I cannot decide whether my life owed more to my books or my books more to my life. I slipped from one world into the other as easily as from room to room. I do not know how much I may have dwelt on the story in later years, but Grimm’s Hansel and Grethel, the children going out into the wood to be lost, dropping a trail of stones behind them and finding their way back, but failing to do so when they used breadcrumbs which the birds ate, came to be to my mind one of the great stories of the world.