I became a little fascinated by Edward Thomas last year when I read the amazing collection of memoirs Under Storms Wing by his widow Helen Thomas. Edward Thomas was a writer, an essayist, and reviewer; who – despite not being obliged to do so as he was in his mid-thirties – joined up when war broke out and was killed in Arras in 1917. He left behind him a wealth of poetry and so is now counted among the number of World War One poets.
This fragment of autobiography which Edward Thomas left behind him when he died was not published until 1938 although this edition which includes some pages of Edward Thomas’s 1917 diary from the trenches was published by Faber and Faber in 2008. I was surprised that there are no reviews for it on either goodreads or Librarything – my sister bought me this edition for Christmas so it is still available somewhere – although I get the impression it’s not cheap.
“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, of first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on the side of it also”
In this small volume of memoirs – as the title suggests – Edward Thomas reflects on his childhood – his upbringing in London, his trips to Wiltshire and Wales. In these memoirs we gradually begin to see in the child – the man that he was to become. Edward Thomas was a famous walker, a lover of the countryside and the natural world, and here in the memories of his childhood we see the first stirrings of this great love affair. As a boy he could already out stride the other boys – he was obviously quite proud of this ability. Edward Thomas’s childhood of course was that of a Victorian child, and his was a childhood of board and Grammar schooling and later the strange and new life of a public school. He tells of walking home bowling hoops and spinning tops, the disappointment of Christmas presents and those many transitory friendships of childhood – that remain indistinct in our memoires.
Edward Thomas was a pigeon fancier – he loved his pigeons lying to parents in order to buy a new pigeon shedding tears when a vile man who was selling him pigeons killed one in front of him to torment him. If there was one thing that was going to make me warm to Edward Thomas the boy – it was the thought of him and his pigeons.
“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.”
This is an autobiography cut tragically short – written in the beautifully rendered prose of a poet his affinity with the English countryside is clear - had Edward Thomas been around to complete this work I suspect it would have been a truly joyous thing. As it is – because this is a fragment – a little over 150 pages of autobiography and a further 26 of his war diaries – Edward Thomas remains a little elusive. For me though it is a tantalising elusiveness – although he remains at arms-length I feel as if I began to get to know him a little better – we just got interrupted. Edward Thomas, pigeon fancier, collector of butterflies and birds eggs, walker, soldier and poet – he was known to be a difficult man, a depressive and a loner – overall though – I’m still fascinated. ( )