I went there on a hot summer’s day in 1964, just before we sat our ‘A’ level exams. Father Mythen, our teacher of Latin and Greek, and also our headmaster in the small junior seminary of fifty boys, thought it would be a good break for us two, Chris Gaffney and myself, to get our heads out of books and away from worry, and to give us a day out into the countryside. And that is how I came to Adlestrop.
The sun was high in the sky, the fields were full of harvest grain and singing birds. The country lane was still, as on that faraway day in 1915 when the poet, Edward Thomas had come this way, not like me by car, but on a train out of Oxford. In his day there was a station at Adlestrop, albeit a small one. Now, in my day, forty-nine years later, and forty-six years ago, there was no sign of any building, but the railway line still operated, and a platform still ran along side it, separating the track and the lush green fields.
Did Father Mythen take out the book of poems and read it out to us? I cannot remember, but it is likely that he did. I hope he did. It is a haunting poem, sparsely written, not a word more than needed to evoke the atmosphere and place and the time and the moment. It was hot, the train was not supposed to stop. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. That very simple human noise and event, on a railway halt in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the Great War, is captured for all time in these few simple words that begin, “Yes, I remember Adlestrop – the name.”
Thomas remembers the scene as being “lonely fair”, and he describes the haycocks in the field and the white clouds in the sky in these words. And it felt like that on the day I called there. The fields were quiet, there was no one to be seen, the platform was empty, the spot was no longer a halt, let alone a station. In the middle of this beautiful summer’s afternoon, in 1964, we were actually making a pilgrimage to the summer of 1915. It was a case of Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire and ‘nostalgiashire’.
The whole poem captures a moment in time, and in that captured capsule there is hissing steam and a cleared throat, and then the sound of a blackbird, and after that all the birds of those shires, echoing further and further away into the mists of yesteryear.
My own visit felt as wistful and nostalgic as the poem itself, and as Edward Thomas’ visit during that summer of the Great War. And every time I think of it, and I think of it often, I feel it lonely fair.
2010
Erris Poetry 