Best remembered today as a poet of World War I, Edward Thomas also wrote several volumes of prose, including a biography of the naturalist Richard Jefferies. Thomas was born in the London borough of Lambeth, and in "Broken Memories" he describes how the pastoral suburb of his childhood has been "effaced" by the inexorable growth of the city. Thomas was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917.

Broken Memories

by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

"Mr ___, the well-known merchant, is building a fine house, half a mile from the Road. Close upon two acres of woodland have been felled, where, by the way, the largest and juiciest blackberries I know used to be found."
London Local Newspaper

And in this way many suburbans have seen the paradise of their boyhood effaced. The building rises during some long farewell, and steals away a fraction of the very sky in which once we beheld Orion sink down like a falling sword into the west and its line of battlemented woods. Only here and there a coppice will survive, blockaded by houses a-row. Sometimes a well-beloved pleasaunce is left almost as it was; the trees are the same; the voices are the same; a silence is there still; but there is a caret somewhere--in ourselves or in the place. In childhood we went there as often as our legs could bear us so far; oftener yet in youth; but less and less with time. Then, perhaps, we travel--anyway we live feverishly and variously; and only think of the old places when the fire is tranquil and lights are out, and "each into himself descends," or when we meet one who was once a friend, or when we lay open a forgotten drawer.

A very slender chain only binds us to the gods of forest and field but binds us nevertheless. Then we take the old walk, it may be, in a walking suit of the best; fearful of mire; carrying a field-glass too; and smoking the pipe that used to seem an insult so intolerable in the great woods. We take the old walk, and it seems shorter than before, a walk not formidable at all, as it was in the years when the end used to find us testy with fatigue and overpowered by tumultuous impressions; when we ourselves thought the sea itself could not be far, and the names of village and hill we visited were unknown.

A railway bisects the common we cross. Everything is haggard and stale; the horizon is gone; and the spirit chafes and suffocates for lack of it. (But the gorse is in flower still.) Then the feet weary on gravel paths downhill. On either side are fields, edged by flaccid suburban grass, with an odour as of tombs--as though nothing fair could blossom in a soil that must be the sepulchre of many divinities. And again the pathway is dogged by houses, interrupting the fields. The former sanity and amenity of air is gone. We can no longer shorten the way to the next houses by a path from the willowy riverside over fields, for the willows are down, the fields heavily burdened with streets. Another length of mean houses, neither urban nor rustic, but both, where I remember the wretched children's discordant admiration of the abounding gold hair of a passer-by; and soon the bridge over a railway gives a view across plantations of cabbage, etc. But the view is comforting--there is an horizon! There is an horizon barred with poplar trees to the south; the streets are behind, in the north. The horizon is dear to us yet, as the possible home of the unknown and the greatly desired, as the apparent birthplace and tomb of setting and rising suns; from under it the clouds mount, and under it again they return after crossing the sky. A mystery is about it as when we were children playing upon a broad, treeless common, and actually long continued running in pursuit of the horizon.

After three miles in all we leave the turnpike, to follow a new but grassy road out among the fields, under lines of acacia and poplar and horse-chestnut last. Once more the ploughland shows us the twinkling flight of pewits; the well, and the quaking water uplifted in a shining band where it touches the stones; the voices of sparrows while the trees are dripping in the dawn; and overhead the pompous mobilisation of cloud armadas, so imposing in a country where they tilt against ebony boughs. . . . In a thicket some gipsies have encamped, and two of them superb youths, with favours of raven hair blowing across the dusky roses of their cheeks--have jumped from their labour to hear the postman reading their letters. Several pipe-sucking bird-catchers are at watch over an expanse of nets. We cross a ploughland half within the sovereignty of the forest shadow. Here is the wood!

The big wood we called it. So well we knew it, and for so many years wandered here with weeping like Imogen's, and with laughter like Yorick's laughter that when past years bulk into the likeness of a forest, through which the memory takes its pleasure at eventide,

"Or in clear dream or solemn vision,"

it is really this wood that we see, under a halcyon sky.
Concluded on page two