Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  The press-gang came for William

  When he was all alone, but safe and sound, and much missed when she went to Australia. Then there were two sisters, Alice and Clara, who were with us together, and had conspicuous powers as actresses and managers. They were always dressing up themselves or us, to surprise my father, who had no wish to be surprised. Alice, the elder, a tall dark girl, had the supreme gift of being able to step out from the attic window on to the gutter and up on to the roof, and move freely there or look down on us in the garden. These sisters regarded themselves as not exactly servants. That they knew an aged German count whom we used to see about in the streets gave them a sort of glory. Our quiet stiff home could not contain these two very long: even Alice without Clara proved impossible. For a time we tried mother’s helps instead of servants. We called them ‘Miss’ Brown and so on. One was a prettyish small thing who once hid herself under my bed and emerged while I was undressing: it made me indignant at first as I always was if taken unawares, but a little vain afterwards because I thought she liked me. The most exciting was a girl from Hampshire, a rather handsome, tall, bony, and pale girl, a farmer’s daughter who had left home after some quarrel. I think she said her father was a gentleman farmer. She talked a lot about horses. At supper she did practically all the talking, and I remember that my father did not much want to be amused when she was telling of the lovers who would get lost in her father’s copses on fine evenings. She was a merry creature. She and a pretty friend who came to see her, an actress with soft dark hair and a romantic name, wanted to romp with us and be familiar. But I drew off, suspiciously, feeling that I did not understand them, wishing not to give myself away. I left them alone with my younger brothers, drawing enigmatical figures on paper and asking riddles and laughing both openly and to themselves. If I could not hold my own I would retreat and not be victimized. Miss — also did not stay long. I was sorry when she was gone. Nearly all these women I liked in some way. For one thing, they were very patient and kind, while several of them, I can see now, I admired and enjoyed admiring for their sweet looks or language or presence. The only woman I had anything to do with regularly was my mother, and except at meals and bedtime I did not see much even of my mother. Occasionally we played cards or draughts together in the evenings. My mother played the piano a little; my father sang ‘Bonny Mary of Argyle’ to her accompaniment. No doubt often I went to London with them. For example, I was taken to a pantomime, where the mannish donkey and the clown wreathed in sausages seemed to my memory worth retaining. London made no impression: I simply recall sitting inside a bus and studying the list of fares at the inner end. I suppose I had gradually in my own populous and busy neighbourhood become accustomed to something like all that could be seen or heard in London except the river. Even a visit when I was thirteen with only a lesser boy for company left me nothing to recall it by except my pride at making my way to a big shop in Cheapside unaided. I only knew enough to make a dim picture of squalor, rags and blood, when I heard the newspaper boys hoarsely breaking the silence of the cold foggy night with shouts of ‘Horrible murder in Whitechapel. Another Ripper Murder. Horrible murder.’

  Of course I continued, more and more often, to accompany my parents to the Unitarian chapel on Sunday. For a time I was a regular attendant because I sang in the choir. The sound of ‘How lovely are the messengers’ was pleasant to me, but it was a curious sensation altogether remote from my games and walks and pigeon-keeping. It was an oasis, the mirage of an oasis, in the chapel desert. Sitting between my father and my mother, I watched now the sad solemn gentle preacher against a background of Faith, Hope, and Charity, now the feathers in the stout lady’s hat just in front of us, now the momentarily visible exquisite profile smooth soft cool glowing skin and perfect scarlet lips of her daughter, the bald head of her husband, and now fleetingly the serried multitudes, the spectacled women, the old men, the pale young men, all in suspended animation. Though some of these seemed to me absurd I had never a glimmering of the courage needed to laugh at them. Faith, Hope, and Charity were words which I could perhaps just dissociate from their vulgar uses, but as I knew of no other use the process left them words pure and simple. Perhaps my weariness in chapel was mingled with something which specialists would label as religious. I only know that where people were sad and solemn I was overcome, half-suffocated by the sadness and solemnity. What was read and preached was to me airy nothing. I knew of no virtues except truthfulness, obedience, self-sacrifice, total abstinence from alcoholic drinks. Because it was more comfortable than disobedience as a rule I was obedient. I habitually told the truth when I had nothing which I thought could easily be gained by lying. I stole biscuits and sweets from my mother’s cupboard and was tearfully penitent when found out. I never wanted to drink ale except when my uncle poured it out for me in a tot. As for self-sacrifice it was mostly incredible. But I liked to please my mother and keep undisturbed the love that was between us. I sometimes did little unexpected kind things out of my tenderness for her, and was always glad to be the one to take up tea for her if she was unwell, and so on, or to help her with the housework when she was left servantless. But with her as with everyone I was deceitful and had dread of being caught doing what I ought not to do. It was a great and frequent dread. For I felt that most things a boy liked doing annoyed some elder or another; that to annoy an elder was the essence of wrong. My solution was to try not to annoy at the same time that I was doing almost as I liked. Deceit and dread increased rapidly. My mother never attempted to add to the religion of the chapel. On the contrary she roused my indignation at the two conspicuously Christian aunts who had made her childhood in that dark house at Newport miserable. If she or I had taken more trouble I might have been convinced that all religious people were cruel hypocrites. My grandmother was the only influence on the other side. She persuaded me that I should be really good if I knelt down night and morning by my bed and ‘said my prayers’, and for a short time I did so. It was ‘Our Father’ which I repeated, though it was and has ever remained Greek to me. Once only I tried hard to mean something in prayer. There was to be a treat in the country next day, and as I was going downstairs I turned in to my mother’s dark room and, throwing myself down beside the bed with a violence intended to thwart hesitation, doubt, and ridicule, I begged ‘God’ to make it a fine day to-morrow. The day was fine, but I never prayed again. I used to tell my father and mother of this half in jest. I suppose there was religion at my second school. It has been forgotten along with all but the names of the Lamplighter and Horner’s Penny Stories.

  Not even yet can I recall anything distinctly of my brothers beyond the fact of an inconstant feud with the eldest of them. Black-haired and darkeyed like my father, he was shorter for his age, more athletic and acrobatic than I, and shared none of my tastes or hobbies. He was the favourite of my Swindon uncle. Whenever our differences culminated we began by each abusing the other for his darkness or fairness. My brother shouted ‘pale face’, though I had in fact more colour than he ever had; what I called him I do not know. Then we came to blows. I could overcome his strength, but not his spirit. This feud was at times exceedingly bitter, and in one quarrel I was wounded on the head by a clothes prop. At other times it took a less violent form. If he admired one hero, I admired his enemy. On the wall of our bedroom facing us as we lay in bed hung a picture of two little girls, one slightly fairer and littler than the other. We laid claim to these girls as sweethearts. I of course chose the fair one; my brother of course chose the dark one, as he called her because she was the less fair. Our hostility had very deep roots. A fright that I once unintentionally gave my brother by rising up unexpectedly draped in a green tablecloth may have had something to do with it; and I remember that when he awoke screaming and sweating at night sometimes nobody was less likely to quiet him than I; he screamed all the more at sight of me. We saw little of one another except on Sundays and on holidays, since he and one or two of our younger brothers still went to the Bo
ard-school.

  V. SCHOOL GAMES AND EARLY READING

  I did not stay long at the second school. The head master moved into the country and his successor not attracting my father, I was sent to a day school about two miles away in Battersea. This meant that I had my dinner at school, thus spending eight or nine hours a day at a stretch in greenless streets. The playground was asphalt; again there were no organized games, but a dozen groups playing leap frog, fly the garter, or tops, or chasing one another, or simply messing about. ‘Fly the garter’ — if that is its right name — was a grand game to see played by a dozen of the biggest boys. I forget how it came about, but by degrees at length there were four or five boys bent double, forming a continuous line of backs. Each grasped the one in front of him and the first of them had his head, protected by his hands, against the playground wall. From half-way across the playground a big boy ran at a gallop, his ironshod heels pounding the asphalt, towards this line of boys who could see him approaching between their legs. Reaching the line and putting his hands upon the first back to help him leap he leaped forward into the air. A brilliant leaper would use only one hand for the take off: the other gave a sonorous smack on the right place in passing. With legs outspread he flew along the line of backs, and alighted upon the fourth or fifth of them. The lighter his weight, the more fortunate was the steed thus accidentally mounted: the heavier, the greater was the chance that both together crashed to the ground. Then, I think, the leaper added another to the line of backs and set the next leaper an impossible task. The last stayer had a good double row of admirers, silent during the run and the leap, uproarious at the alighting. We smaller boys climbed or tried to climb any upright or horizontal post and rails about the school, on the scaffolding, for example, during some repairs. Tops, chiefly peg tops, we played endlessly. We tried to destroy our opponent’s top by casting our own at it and impaling it with the peg. Or we ‘chipped’ brass buttons or other tops into and out of a ring, by taking up our own top on to the hand while spinning, causing it to sway upon a fixed centre hollowed in the palm, and then casting it at the object with all the rotatory force thus gained. Or we strove against one another at hurling our tops out of the string a long distance, yet so that they should be spinning when they came to a standstill. The best spinners always threw their tops with the pegs pointing away from the ground instead of towards it, which I could never achieve nor understand. Girls did it my way. Cricket and football we had to organize between ourselves. Clapham Common was our ground. Mustering perhaps as many as eleven on paper we assumed a title as the — Cricket Club; we elected officers and committee; we bought a few necessities by subscription; we practised with considerable intervals of fooling and quarrelling; we even played a match or two with similar sides. Only on occasional inspired moments did we labour as if ours were the same game as was played by Abel, Bonnor, Spofforth, Lohmann, Quaife, S. M. J. Woods, Gunn, W. W. Read, Sharp, A. P. Wickham. I remember the strolling home, casting a stump now and then into the turf, or pausing to play ‘French cricket’ of ‘tip and run’, better than I do the games. I much preferred football. Later on we joined a football club and played matches with some regularity. Sometimes when the sodden ball was like lead it was but a sad pleasure and not that if in punting one kicked the ball full in one’s own face; but as a rule the full game, or any sort of game, or just kicking about till it was dark, was all I wanted.

  In the class rooms history, geography, grammar, arithmetic, algebra, free-hand-drawing, handwriting, Latin, French, chemistry, or the avoiding of the same, took up about five hours a day for five days a week. The one charm of the place was the temporary youth, a different one each week, who came over from a neighbouring training college to help the permanent master of each class. These students we looked upon as prey. In a few minutes the corporate brain of the class knew their victim thoroughly in so far as he concerned them, knew whether he need be obeyed, whether he could be both disobeyed and cheeked, whether he could also be mocked for some peculiarity of manner or accent. Funniest of all was a Frenchman who said ‘What do they call you?’ instead of ‘What is your name?’ The permanent masters were a strict sardonic one with ginger hair, a mild incalculable black-haired one with a ridiculously mild voice, and an altogether humorous one with bulging eyes and an amused unastonishable look who managed the top form with a smile. Then there was the head master, grey-bearded, spectacled, squat, and bandy-legged, but rapid. I remember him coming in once when the funniest boy in the class was amusing us all, the master being absent. He did not see the head entering the door behind him. He had a broad smile on his face when that devil from behind struck him hard on ear and cheek with his open palm, without a word. We who saw the blow coming were hardly more abashed and upset than Jack was. Our own master, the sardonic one, often caned Jack to his face. It was an unemotional ceremony. The master liked Jack but had to do it. Jack didn’t mind at all, and held out his hand smiling, with only the slightest twitch on his cheerful face at each blow. Jack was a strong, easy-going, kind-hearted dunce. With him and various lean and fat, diligent and idle, and intermediate boys I did my lessons. I could learn anything easily and was seldom lower than fourth in the class, more often than not first, and had usually on one side of me a silent good boy. I who was never good at languages, least of all at Latin, sometimes knew more Latin than the master. The pleasure of being top, and nothing else, except the interest of my father, made me do such homework as I did in the evenings. We learnt Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon. But I was in a period of prose which the place encouraged. I rattled off the lines I had committed to memory. The task endowed me only with the idea that it was possible for a man’s hair to grow white in a single night from sudden fear. I remember the electric battery, the smell of the acids in the chemistry room, and the treacly look of sulphur melted, and shame of my only caning. It was but one stroke, for I was a sort of ‘good boy’, being shy, restrained, secretive, and never a leader, and with an expression quite superficially and accidentally resembling that of the virtuous. I passed some examination in chemistry but, as with other things, cared nothing for it, except for doing as well as most at it. For a while I played with magnets and amber, and rubbed the cat’s fur in the dark. My father made me attend evening lectures for a time on sound, light, and heat — with no effect.

  The midday hours when I had dinner at school, played in the playground or wandered about Battersea or visited boys’ homes, and saw their pigeons, were a relief from no great servitude or labour. How I enjoyed the strongly spiced unusual soups and the sausages — and the sweets bought instead of food — and the pennies saved up and at last spent on a new pigeon. Then I had to pretend that I had won the pigeon in a raffle. Once or twice this was believed. I was found out because one day when I wanted to tell my parents that I had sixpence I bent over the front garden fence while my mother was gardening, and pretended to pick up the sixpence. Probably I was already suspected. My mother disbelieved the story. I confessed. My father spoke to me angrily. As I hated anger and blame, I became wretched. The result was that very soon indeed afterwards my father came with a very sad but kind face in to the room where I sat alone and told me he was sure I should not do that sort of thing again. His shaking hands with me made me feel half hero, half saint. Naturally I did not do quite that sort of thing again. But the pleasure of coming home with a new pigeon was irresistible. The purchase excited me. Sometimes I took a fancy to a particular bird. Perhaps more often I had to have some bird — almost any bird at once. The shilling was in my pocket. I could not possibly go home in this condition. Then it was a pleasure to hold the legs between the two forefingers, the thumb and shorter fingers almost meeting over the body. You might have thought the bird was a divinely beautiful, immortal, or miraculous bird, had you known how the acquiring and the first possessing it thrilled me through and made me forget weather, time, meals, father and mother and native land. Every step towards the boy’s garden or the shop — a crowded fancier’s or a cornchandler’s wi
th a couple of cages only in the doorway — gave me again the pleasure of anticipation and the pain of delay together.

  I had no love to give Byron’s poetry, but, in the intervals of pigeon-keeping, I read avidly. On wet days and dark winter evenings I bolted scores of books by Mayne Reid. Fenimore Cooper was now much too dilatory. Henty was often beside the mark. Better even than Mayne Reid were some of the anonymous mixers of blood and thunder. I always retained at least an affectation of scorn for ‘Deadwood Dick’ stories in particular, but not for the class to which they belonged. I varied them, if it was a variation, with a never-ending serial entitled Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays and more improving things of the same kidney in the Boys’ Own Paper. The Headless Horseman, The Scalp Hunters, The Boy Hunters of Kentucky, The Secret of Adam’s Peak, are now but words to me, ‘Open Sesame’ powerless to open more than a slit in the door behind which Indians, cowboys, and Mexican greasers mounted on fiery mustangs, armed with beautiful big guns, bows and arrows, revolvers and bowie knives and lassoes, hunt, fight, and round up cattle night and day for ever and ever. While I read the books I polished up the silver falcon crest shield, which all of us wore on our caps, with mercury.