Benedict Mackay:
The Common exercised a powerful influence on Thomas. The first stirrings of interest in the natural world began here, it was the crucible of his passionate curiosity about plants, trees and birdlife — all of which he shared with his brothers, with Helen and, later, with his children. It was an emotional firewall between a land that he loved and the erosion of urban sprawl. He writes with relish of the games and activities, such as fishing, smoking, hoop bowling and day-long explorations: The Common — offered many temptations to more irregular games and aimless rovings. For it was an uneven piece of never cultivated gravelly land. Several ponds of irregular shape and size, varying with rainfall, had been hollowed out, perhaps by old gravel diggings. It was marshy in other places — A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and had somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were hills to us who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them.18 Children experience a place where they can rove, alone or with other youngsters, as somehow 'their own.'
In The Happy go Lucky Morgans,19 (created in large part out of the writer's personal memories and feelings) Arthur must surely be referring possessively to Wandsworth Common as Our Country, which Arthur/Edward Thomas enjoyed along with Richmond Park, or Wimbledon Common, all to ourselves.
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