The best summary of Edward Thomas's origins and early relationship with Wandsworth Common (that I know of) was written by John Moore in 1939, for his edition of Edward Thomas's letters. I am including the first few pages here, because it does the job very much better than I ever could.
But good as Moore's account is, you really ought to read Edward Thomas himself.
[1]
THE grave-eyed, rather demure-looking boy with the primitive fishing-rod was in no way more remarkable than the other brats whose jam-jars of sticklebacks and gudgeons proclaimed their common citizenship of the furzy wasteland at Wandsworth. Thrushes' eggs, catapults, tame pigeons and butterfly-nets were the stuff of their dreams; Wandsworth Common was all America and each of them a Christopher Columbus. If the grave-eyed one were destined to be a poet, what of it? Poets do not leap into the world ready-made; the years shape them. At the age of ten Edward Thomas, who was neither a prig nor a prodigy, was just another boy. This account of his boyhood might but for trifling differences of circumstances be the account of yours or mine.
The important things, at the age of ten, were those gudgeons and rosy-throated sticklebacks, newts with bright orange bellies, rare and prodigious perch five inches long, red admirals and painted ladies, the thrush's nest with five blue eggs hidden deep in the maybush. Since all these belonged to Wandsworth Common it is convenient that this book should begin there.
It was a waste of gorse and hawthorn-thickets, dotted with a number of old gravel-pits filled with rain-water. These were the rather dirty ponds which yielded small fishes to the bent pin, efts and water-beetles and frogspawn to the dipped jam-jar.
[2]
The biggest of them was reputed to contain carp. Young Edward Thomas had seen and coveted one, triumphantly carried by a boy who had decapitated it in order to make it fit his jam-jar; he angled in the pond for days afterwards, and the fact that he caught nothing merely increased his respect for the muddy mysterious deeps and the wise secret fishes.
Next in importance to the ponds were the hawthorn-thickets with their promise of rare birds'-nests. (Anything other than a thrush's or a blackbird's was rare at Wandsworth.) There were also poplar-trees, where you could search for the exciting horned caterpillars of poplar-hawks, open spaces which served as pitches for improvised games of cricket or football, and patches of thick undergrowth where you kicked up mousy moths at every step in the summer.
There was even a deep bushy cutting, where the railway ran across the common, which was forbidden territory and therefore as tempting as El Dorado. Edward Thomas in his imagination peopled its thickets with unseen foxes.
Vast as all America seemed this trivial piece of wasteland to the boys who played and fished there; they could spend a whole day on it without thinking it small or suburban, although it was hedged about by the dingy streets and the rows of little semi-detached pale-brick houses in which they lived.
Edward Thomas's home was in Wakehurst Road, only a few hundred yards away; it was distinguished from its neighbours by a coach-house, the only one in the street, which looked as if it belonged to the Thomases but was really part of the premises next door. Otherwise the houses in the row were almost exactly alike; they were lower-middle-class, aspidistra-bedecked, respectable dwellings, inhabited for the most part by clerks and the kin of clerks. The Thomases had moved here from Lambeth after the birth of their first child, Edward, which happened on the third of March, 1878 . . . ;
[3]
Mr. Thomas was a clerk of a slightly superior kind. He was a Civil Servant, employed at the Board of Trade in some capacity connected with "light railways and trams"; and like most Welshmen who come to London he had "bettered himself," and achieved a sort of standing and respectability which few of his relations possessed. His family belonged to Glamorgan and Gwent; he was short, stocky, black-haired and brown-eyed, eloquent, vain, confident, and clever. The Welsh tradition of Nonconformity was strong in him, although he was something of a freethinker and a leader of the "Positivists."* He had thrown over the fierce revivalist faith of his forefathers, but he was naturally religious and so, whereas they had sternly believed in the devil and in hell, he must sternly disbelieve in the devil and in hell, which he did with an awful solemnity. The other article of his faith was that Mr. Gladstone was a glorious, great and good man. His Radicalism and his disbelief in the devil were, apart from his work, the chief interests in Mr. Thomas's life. His wife was all that he was not; she was kindly, gentle, and domesticated, and although she too was Welsh (her parents lived at Newport in Monmouthshire) she had blue eyes, a clear-cut profile, and light-golden-brown hair. She agreed with everything that Mr. Thomas did and said, though whether she really felt very strongly about the devil is questionable; and she dutifully bore her husband six children, all boys, of which Edward was the eldest. She clothed them, cooked for them, cleaned them, and dried their tears, and they loved her, whereas their father they
[4]
The family was not well-off, Mr. Thomas's moderate salary was quickly spent in "keeping up appearances," in consolidating the position of bowler-hatted, black-coated respectability to which he had laboriously attained. So Edward was sent to a Board School, where, in a great lofty class-room which always smelled faintly of carbolic soap, he duly learned "for ever and ever" the names of the tributaries of the Thames and the dates of the Kings of England, and repeated aloud such parrot-like and mystical-sounding phrases as "Witney on the Windrush Manufactures Blankets."
Here also he learned to fight, which in spite of his demure appearance he did quite well; the Common was the scene of frequent guerrilla warfare, and sometimes of pitched and bloody battles, between the Board School boys (opprobriously known as "Boardy Blags") and the boys belonging to a neighbouring Grammar School, who felt themselves to be socially superior although they walked the same way home.
When there was nobody to fight, the brats played unorganized and individualistic games of the sort which are almost forgotten now: tipcat and hopscotch, with all their nameless and esoteric variations. They purposelessly bowled hoops and spun tops. They played marbles. (And once the casual mention of marbles at home led Edward to make the astonishing and awe-inspiring discovery that his father, in his youth, had played marbles, too; that he had even been something of an expert, and still remembered the trick with thumb and forefinger and the curious terminology of the game. Edward could hardly believe it; he had not completely realized, until that moment, that his father had ever been young.)
When he was ten, Edward left the Board School and went to a small Private School near by.
Notes
The "Board School" was Belleville, of course. The "small private school" was ? And the
The Grammar School was Battersea Grammar, housed in a large Georgian house where the old Granada Cinema stood on the corner of St John's Hill and Plough Road.
Edward Thomas later went to St Paul's School, Hammersmith.
[Source: John Moore, Life and Letters of Edward Thomas (1939)), pp.1-2.
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