— Index / Links — Edward Thomas.
— Talk — Notes.
— Titles . . . .
— Talk Draft 1.
— Homes 1 . . . .
— Homes 2 . . . .
— Helen Thomas, On Storm's Wing [text part-OCRd].
— Halbrake / St John's Hill House School.
— Sir Walter St John's / Battersea Grammar School.
— Chronicles so far [contents with links].
— Chronicles — all text so far [all text].
Philip Edward Thomas was born on 3 March 1878 — not quite 150 years ago. He was the first child of Mary Elizabeth Townsend and Philip Henry Thomas, an ambitious clerk rising up in the Civil Service. All four of his grandparents had been brought up in Wales, tough his mother was born in Yorkshire.
Here's an aerial view today:
Today there's a plaque on 14 Lansdowne Gardens. It doesn't look in any way "official" — not LCC, English Heritage, or the Vauxhall Society. It was probably placed there by someone who owned the house and was tickled to learn it was associated with Edward Thomas?
When Edward Thomas was just two, the family moved to Wakehurst Road in Battersea, very close to Northcote Road.
(So far as I know Edward was rarely called "Philip", except in official documents. He was often called "Edwy".)
A brother, Ernest Henry, soon arrived:
[Insert map showing position, and comment on how similar/different it was from today.]
Our street like three or four others parallel to it was in two halves, running straight up the opposite sides of a slight valley, along the bottom of which ran the principal street of mixed shops and private houses.
Our house was low down in the half which ran up westwards to Bolingbroke Grove, the eastern boundary of Wandsworth Common. These little semi-detached one-storied pale brick houses in unbroken lines on both sides of the street had each, even then when they were new, something distinguishing them and preventing monotony.
The people in them made them different. In addition, some were beginning to be draped in creepers. Some gates stood open, some were shut. One had bushes in the garden, another had flowers, another nothing but dark trodden gravel.
The house above ours, in the next pair, was presumably meant for a doctor, and possessed a coach house which looked almost as if it belonged to us. That was our outward distinction.
[Childhood, p.23.]
Here's another view:
Notice in the distance, top right, Belleville School. Childhood, his autobiographical "fragment", describes his experiences here in vivid detail.
[Add quotes about the school here? Or leave until later?]
But the most important feature of this house in Edward Thomas's life story lies in the opposite direction — in its proximity to Wandsworth Common, a couple of hundred yards away, as we shall see later.
Unlike today, very young children were allowed — one might say encouraged, but generally in fact ordered to "go out to play". A walk to the Common would have been nothing, even for a very young child. (As indeed it was for me in the 1950s.)
While we were at this house my mother presented me with four brothers at intervals of two years, but, as I have no recollection of them during that period beyond the fact that on certain dim occasions . . . one or other was present, I say nothing about them. Being thus seven in family we moved to a large house in one of the roads parallel to the old one. [Childhood, p.60.]
[HoWC: Childhood — complete text.]
["four brothers" implies his second brother (Ernest) had already been born. But his birth is shown as Battersea. Why the apparent anomaly?]
Notice how much more built-up the area is, in the space of just a few years. Presumably the number of young children must have been growing rapidly — hence Honeywell School would open almost next door to Belleville that year, 1891.
(Click on image to enlarge)
In comparison with the Wakehurst Road house, Edward Thomas writes very little about their new house, though he admits that "the new house had also a charm. Its size allowed an empty room for us to play in, and a box-room."
On the first few days after the move I went several times most of the way down from school to the old house before realising my mistake. Whether I had regrets for it or not, it began almost at once to have a dreamy charm too faint to be describable. It was a visible piece of the past, a skeleton, a hollow shell that did without us.
[Children, pp.61-61.]
[Much the same thing happened to me. I grew up behind Wandsworth Prison, in the Officers Quarters, around a Green. At age 8, I moved few hundred yards to a block of new flats on Heathfield Road — still part of the prison estate, but on Heathfield Road. Returning from Beatrix Potter School, I'd often walk past the new house and turn into the Quarters, before "realising my mistake". ]
Edward hated the place. And hated Sundays.
[Childhood, pp232-33.]
School was not an affliction, but church or chapel or Sunday school was. At an early age I did not go regularly, nor I think did my parents. They were sober reverent people without a creed, though their disbelief in Hell and the Devil almost amounted to a creed. My father and I made merry over the Devil and the folly of believing in him as we supposed many did.
He used to try different chapels or different preachers, sometimes taking me with him, more especially when he had become an almost weekly attendant at a Unitarian Chapel. Here from the prickly silence of two hundred or three hundred people I gradually came to feel a mild poison steadily creeping into me on all sides. I never made a friend of any of the boys who attended there. A deathly solemnity filled the chapel.
After the service couples walked to and fro or gathered into knots on the pavement outside. The deathly solemnity was strong enough to cling about the people even there in the sunlight: some of them it accompanied to their one o'clock roast beef or mutton. But at first the Sunday-school was my particular allowance. I liked singing and liked the melodies of "Jerusalem the Golden" and "Fair waved the golden corn', and I liked going with all the rest for the annual treat somewhere in Surrey, where I could run about in a wood, become fond of another
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girl or two (I remember one with a very deep but I think also husky voice), eat bread and butter, watercress and slices of cake and drink tea. The confinement in the schoolroom was not quite a positive ill. It was regular, it was inevitable, and until later on there was usually nothing in particular of which it deprived me except liberty.
But Sunday was a bad day and this was the worst part of it. That deathly solemnity, whether we respected it or not, was equally thick in the schoolroom. I became accustomed to making a sort of drug of boredom. I did not rebel, but taking this poison became fairly oblivious to the good or evil that befell Jesus Christ, or Servetus, or myself.
Moreover, I did positively loathe with continuous loathing the trailing with one or more of my brothers along the Sunday streets, in our stiff Sunday clothes and our Sunday hats. I hated these clothes and hats and I felt also that they made me ridiculous in the eyes of others. If the hat was blown off by the wind it was some relief: and I could then stamp on the thing and put it down to the wind and mud. What wonder that I made no friends under this Upas-tree.
The majority of the children came from homes poorer or less refined than mine, and with the exception of one or two girls whom I thought pretty I looked down on them though ever so lightly. The few boys whose parents knew ours, if they never visited one another, never became our friends. Some suspiciousness existed between us which our best clothing did not
[On Servetus, see Wikipedia: Michael Servetus. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later rejected the Trinity doctrine and mainstream Catholic Christology. After being condemned by Catholic authorities in France, he fled to Calvinist Geneva where he was denounced by John Calvin himself and burned at the stake for heresy by order of the city's governing council.] i.e. ET is being ironic.]
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permit us to destroy. Chapel and Sunday-school were to me cruel ceremonious punishments for the freedom of Monday to Saturday. I have still a profound quiet detestation of Sunday in whatever part of England or Wales it overtakes me, but most of all in London. I think I began learning to hate crowds and societies, and grown-up people, and black clothes, and silk hats and neatly folded umbrellas and shining walking-sticks, and everything that seemed a circling part of that deathly solemnity as I was not. Nevertheless, I may have looked decidedly a part of it with my shy bored silence, my fear of disagreement or quarrel in public, and my thin long narrow face that always shrank and chilled and stiffened into solemnity under the gaze of grown-up people, strangers, and numbers.
There was, however, always one good thing about Sunday, and that was the biscuits, two large oval ones or one of these and two small round ones, which I found on a bedside chair upon awaking. The crumbs of these biscuits among the sheets became a nuisance; for we got up later on Sundays than weekdays.
[HoWC: Childhood — complete Text.]
For some reason it's proving difficult to identify all of the homes and moving dates for the Noble family.
The main home we're concerned with is 6 Patten Road, i what is now called the "Toast Rack" but was then called "College Park" — an allusion to Magdalen College, which owned the area as a speculative development very much wit the middle class in mind.
The Nobles, who were born in the north-west, near Liverpool, appear to have moved backwards and forwards between there and London, driven partly by the JAN's work as a writer and editor, and partly by his oor health. (It was believed the south was rather better, though in fact he died hre in ??? at the age of just 52 ? and is buried in Magdalen Road Cemetery (his wife, ? , was buried there in ?
James was . . . .
His daughter Helen Berenice Noble was born in Liverpool in July 1877 and attended Wimbledon High School when the family moved back to London in 1893, after a previous stay of two years. They later lived initially at 15 The Grove in Wandsworth, which later became 37 St Ann's Hill. The house was part of a section called Agincourt Villas, which was destroyed in July 1944 by a flying bomb. This was where Helen and Edward first met." [Richard Purcher, "Edward and Helen Thomas in Battersea and Wandsworth", ET Fellowship Newsletter 67, 2016
Also
[Berenice — a curious choice of name. See e.g. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Berenice-Roman-aristocrat]
" — the Noble family left Southport for Liverpool in 1892. [17] It seems that it was the following year they moved to London. [18] Their first London house was 15 The Grove, Wandsworth (now St Ann's Hill), 'a little new villa in a row'. [19] The terrace was called Agincourt Villas: it consisted of 22 houses, probably those for which a local builder submitted plans in 1892. [20] Number 15 was eventually renumbered as number 37, and appears to have been destroyed by a V1 flying bomb on the 16th-17th July 1944. 15
The Grove was where Edward Thomas made his first visit to Noble, while, in Helen's telling vignette, she and her sisters, typically for a group of aesthetic girls, were singing extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Mikado' (1885) around the piano. [21] On 9 December 1895 the Nobles moved to a bigger house in Wandsworth, 6 Patten Road, just across the Common from the Thomas home in Shelgate Road. [22]"[ET Fellowship Newsletter 53, Jan 2005]
Helen Berenice Noble born 11 July 1877 [so a little older than ET].
JAN: Vaariously described as a journalist, essayist, poet, proprietor of the Liberal magazine ?,? In London c.1882-1883 — if so, where? Nicosia Road? Why here?
"The Noble family was from Liverpool. It was Ashcroft Noble and Helen’s birthplace, but since 1883, when a two year-long attempt to live in London had been terminated by Noble’s ill-health, they had lived just up the coast from Liverpool itself, in or near Southport." Kedrun Laurie, Schooling]
1892 — The Noble family left Southport for Liverpool, and shortly after to London.
1893 — moved to London — 15 The Grove (now St Ann's Hill) — where ET first visited JAN.
Moved again — to Patten Rd = 9 December 1895.
OS-1893-1894-ALL-600dpi-part-edited.psd
[The Grove was renamed St Ann's Hill [with no "e"] — it runs in a slight curve between Earlsfield Road and East Hill, past St Anne's [Anne with an "e"] Church. [The former St Ann's Hill was renamed St Ann's Crescent, as it is today.]]
"Their first London house was 15 The Grove, Wandsworth (now St Ann's Hill), 'a little new villa in a row'. The terrace was called Agincourt Villas: it consisted of 22 houses, probably those for which a local builder submitted plans in 1892. [20]
Number 15 was eventually renumbered as number 37, and appears to have been destroyed by a V1 flying bomb on the 16th-17th July 1944. "
The Grove was where Edward Thomas made his first visit to Noble, while, in Helen's telling vignette, she and her sisters, typically for a group of aesthetic girls, were singing extracts from Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Mikado' (1885) around the piano. [21]
On 9 December 1895 the Nobles moved to a bigger house in Wandsworth, 6 Patten Road, just across the Common from the Thomas home in Shelgate Road."[ET Fellowship Newsletter 53, Jan 2005 [ET Fellowship Newsletter 53, Jan 2005]
]
Helen attended Wimbledon High School for Girls — a relatively new Girls' Day School Trust establishment, opened 1880.
Admitted May 1893, age 15.
Left July 1894, age 17.
"I think that when you get to know my Helen she might make a very nice friend for you. She is a few months older than you, but she is in many ways younger than her years, and she loves Nature and beautiful things just as you do, though in some ways she is not so clever as the others." [Kedrun Laurie, Schooling . . . ]
9 December 1895 the Nobles moved to a bigger house in Wandsworth, 6 Patten Road, just across the Common from the Thomas home in Shelgate Road. Helen was not "academic", and was probably useful in looking after the new home.
[Which may have fitted nicely / conveniently with the theory of the [New Aesthetes] that women were home-makers and educator of children, albeit of a higher order than servants? [have a look at Kedrun Laurie, Schooling.] Hence Helen went on to be a governess/companion, and then a [?kindergarten teacher at her children's school, Bedales.]
They started walking together, often covering great distances.
Helen and Edward, and their baby Merfyn, find a cheap flat near Garratt Lane.
It was a very much poorer area than either Edward or Helen had been used to.
Notice the absence of front gardens or street trees. he houses were divided into two, up and down. Within a hundred yards or so, there was the immense Wandsworth and Clapham Union Workhouse, on Swaffield Road, and numerous factories between Garratt Lane and the the Wandle — many of them contributing to the infamous smells of the area.
But not, it seems, the odour-free Harrison Barber knackers yard, the largest in London, where 25,000 old horses a year were brought to be slaughtered. (This was on the site of the Henry Prince Estate near the remarkable zig-zag on Garratt Lane.)
Also Wardley Street, with its numerous carters, costermongers and rag-and-bone men, and horses kept in the back gardens — which Charles Booth described in 1905 as one of the worst slums in London".
Last of the London Hrse . . .
They don't last long here.
Here's how Helen described the place:
[Abbreviate or summarise.]
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party wrote to me congratulating me, and the friend I had met before Merfyn’s birth undertook the duties of a godfather, and presented the baby with a Bible inscribed with flippant verses. The occasion was unique, I suppose, and a good opportunity for the display of wit and philosophy, and I enjoyed reading about it in dward’s letters after the event. As was natural, his work suffered a good deal during this last term and it was no surprise to Edward, though a bitter disappointment to his father, when he got only a second-class degree. This, and the natural antagonism of their natures, made life at his home — when he returned from Oxford — no longer possible. Even I, to whom outside circumstances mattered little, had begun to feel the strain of living in that uncongenial atmosphere. It was not long before an open break occurred between Edward and his father, and we looked about for somewhere else to live.
We were very poor. The £250 which we had been depending on was almost gone, and the essays Edward contributed to one or two literary weeklies had earned only about £80 during
the year. But Edward with his tall graceful figure and handsome sensitive face, wearing the elegantly negligent and for him very becoming style of dress of the young aesthete of day, did not at all look the part of the impecunious husband and father, and Mr Thomas’s puritanism rose almost in hatred against his son.
Edward on his side did nothing to placate his father’s anger and intolerance, and refused to consider going into the Civil Service, and only answered his father’s bitter anger with sneers at those very qualities which Mr Thomas most prided himself upon.
With Mrs Thomas it was different. She was no doubt troubled by this new phase in her son, and his circumstances must have been a continual source of anxiety to her, but she had always a far wider outlook on life than her husband, and a generous tolerance and sympathy for the young, which she now extended during this difficult time for Edward. Indeed there was a spiritual understanding between these two which though never expressed, and by his mother hardly recognized, was never violated, but was sustained
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growing intensity to the end of Edward’s life.
As I could not go house-hunting it fell to Edward to find a new home for us. He found, in a new street in what was obviously doomed to become a slum, a half-house of whichmthe rent was seven and sixpence a week, and to this we moved.
It had a good sitting-room which, very much to the builder's surprise, we chose to have distempered a warm grey; a bed-room which just held our bed, the child’s cot and a chest of drawers; and a little kitchen with steps leading from it to a tiny squalid back-yard, used by the downstairs people for keeping ramshackle rabbit hutches and hanging out washing which was always wet and never clean.
There was a notice printed in the rent book which at first puzzled me — "Broken
windows must be repaired by the tenant," but we had not been there a week before we understood the significance of this regulation.
The downstairs people frightened me rather because of their way of moving out in the middle of the night. Very seldom did the downstairs tenants stay longer than a
fortnight, because, as I heard later, they could not be sued for rent under a fortnight’s tenancy. Sometimes they were quiet, but more often noisy, quarrelsome, rough men and women and pale dirty children, often with a poor frightened dog tied up to a barrel in the back yard. All were terribly poor and degraded.
Here we lived for a few months. During that time Edward was out a great deal looking for work, going from one editor's office to another, sending in his card; sometimes being received courteously and sometimes not; sometimes given a book to review or the half-promise to accept an article. He returned trom these dreadful expeditions tired and depressed and angry, hating himself for his failure, hating the polite indifference of
some of the people, hating more the sympathetic interest Which others, who refused him work, put into their voices. But a few there were who were not indifferent to the reserved, shy, sensitive young man, who looked so proudly careless of their favour, and who refused to ingratiate himself, but whose heart was full of angry humiliation and despair. One stands
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out among the rest as coming out to meet Edward with friendly understanding from which the hint of patronage was entirely absent. He was the literary editor of a great daily newspaper whose literary page was written by men of distinction, and earned for its editor a great name in journalism. This man was attracted to Edward by the very qualities which others had found so disconcerting, and divined by his sympathetic understanding of Edward’s austere sincerity the intellectual power in him. He became our friend and benefactor.
The work which he gave Edward was the mainstay of our life for many years, and Edward made, on that page, a name for himself as a critic of belles lettres, and particularly of contemporary verse. His name was H.W. Nevinson.
[Is this the husband of the suffragist ? Nevinson and father of Christopher Nevinson?]
How anxiously I waited for Edward’s homecoming on these days, and how with the first glance at his face I knew what the day had been. If it had been a bad one there was no need of words, and none were uttered. I could do nothing, for if I said one word which would betray that I knew what he had endured and was enduring, his anger and despair and weariness would break out in angry bitter words which would freeze my heart and afterwards freeze his for having uttered them.
So as he ate the evening meal in silence, I talked quietly about the doings of the day, of the baby, of the walk we had been: and soon in our pretty room he would lie back in his big Oxford chair by the fire, smoking his pipe, while I sat on a stool near and sewed; and gradually the weariness would 20 out of his face, and the hard thin line of his mouth would relax to its lovely curve, and he would speak of an essay that had been suggested to him by something he had seen in London, or of a notable volume of poems that Nevinson had promised he should review for the Daily Chronicle. Then I would slip from my stool to the floor between his knees, and he would put out his hand and rest it on my neck, and I would know that the cloud had passed.
But sometimes when his spirit had been more than usually affected by the too great strain that his circumstances put upon it, the cloud did not pass, and my chatter ran dry in the arid
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silence. After a ghastly hour or two with the supper still uneaten on the kitchen table he would say: ‘Go to bed, I’m not coming,’ and I would know that he would sit up all night, and in the morning would be deeper in despair than ever — or he would go out and walk till morning, and perhaps from the silence of night and from the natural sounds of early dawn, and from the peace of solitude and the beauty of intangible things he would find healing and calm. I did not sleep on these nights but took my baby into bed with me, and in suckling him and holding him close, hope and comfort came to me again.
Some days Edward would be at home all day writing and reading, happy and eager with the impulse for creative work which gave him greater satisfaction that anything else. If the weather was fine he would break off his work in the afternoon and putting Merfyn in his pram we would set out for Wimbledon or Richmond Park, somewhere where we could sit on grass and look at trees and clouds and hear birds. There the baby would play himself to sleep while Edward read a book for review, or aloud to me, and we would return in the evening laden with flowers and branches of leaves or berries for our room. Some of the days at home were idle and hopeless — no commissioned work to do, and no impulse for original work ~and on these days the squalid surroundings obtruded upon our spirits, and the harsh voices of the other tenants and the crying of children sounded inhuman like the sounds of hell. One of these days I remember very well. I had not got into the routine of housework and looking after the baby, and I asked Edward to peel the potatoes for the mid-day meal. This he angrily refused to do. But at dinner he praised my cooking, and I, still hurt by his unkindness, could not restrain a few tears at the welcome change of mood. Seeing my distress he jumped up from his chair, ran down the stairs into the street, and returned in two minutes with a bottle of cheap wine. Never was so homely a meal turned into such a joyous banquet. Even the baby sitting in his high chair joined in, for Edward dipping his finger in the wine let Merfyn suck 1€, and
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though he looked more surprised than pleased at the taste, he grinned at the joke when he saw us laughing.
Often we were quite reckless with money. Once when a cheque was bigger than we had expected we bought a beautiful and costly brass lamp made in the William Morris workshops. At other times we were so poor that when Edward was out tor several successive days I lived on the remains of a Christmas pudding Mrs Thomas had given us. But I was strong and healthy, and both my baby whom I was nursing and I flourished.
It was a queer hand-to-mouth way of living, but when we had enough money we entertained our friends and had many evenings of lively talk with beer and pipes as the inevitable accompaniment. In this way I met some of the Oxford friends who had written to me, especially three or four whose friend-ship for Edward lasted all his life, and was extended to me after his death. These young men brought others with them. and I looked forward to these evenings when our room was full of eager talkers and lively wits who were all about our own age, and all enthusiastic adventurers into life.
When we had not enough money for anything else we lived on bread and cheese and tea. I remember having only nine-pence one Saturday to buy provisions for the weckend. It is the only time in my life [have bought a pennyworth of butter
.Yet little by little Edward’s work was increasing, and before we left London he had published his first volume of essays for which he got a small sum on account of royalties. This volume still sells a few copies a year.
[Under Storm's Wing, pp.80-84.]
[A much more agreeable area, of course. Very close to Edward's parents — had there been some sort of reconciliation between Edward and his father?]
[Helen seems not to mention Nightingale Parade. After which they move away permanently — first to Kent, then ? Sussex and Hampshire?]
It was from Rusham Road that he set out in Pursuit of Spring (published 1914):
10 am, 21 March 1913: Edward Thomas set off to cycle from Wandsworth Common to Nether Stowey, in the Quantock Hills of North Somerset.
Why Nether Stowey? Because Coleridge had lived there in the late 1790s, and there Edward Thomas would see "the native soil of "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and "The Ancient Mariner," where Coleridge "on honey-dew hath fed and drunk the milk of Paradise."
I had planned to start on March 21, and rather late than early, to give the road time for drying. The light arrived bravely and innocently enough at sunrise; too bravely, for by eight o'clock it was already abashed by a shower. There could be no doubt that either I must wait for a better day, or at the next convenient fine interval I must pretend to be deceived and set out prepared for all things.
So at ten I started, with maps and sufficient clothes to replace what my waterproof could not protect from rain.
The suburban by-streets already looked rideable; but they were false prophets: the main roads were very different. For example, the surface between the west end of Nightingale Lane and the top of Burntwood Lane was fit only for fancy cycling — in and out among a thousand lakes a yard wide and three inches deep. These should either have been stocked with gold-fish and aquatic plants or drained, but some time had been allowed to pass without either course being adopted.
It may be that all the draining forces of the neighbourhood had been directed to emptying the ornamental pond on Wandsworth Common. Empty it was, and the sodden bed did not improve the look of the common — flat by nature, flatter by recent art.
The gorse was in bloom amidst a patchwork of turf, gravel, and puddle. Terriers raced about or trifled. A flock of starlings bathed together in a puddle until scared by the dogs.
A tall, stern, bald man without a hat strode earnestly in a straight line across the grass and water, as if pleasure had become a duty. He was alone on the common. In all the other residences, that form walls round the common almost on every side, hot-cross buns had proved more alluring than the rain and the south-west wind.
The scene was, in fact, one more likely to be pleasing in a picture than in itself. It was tame: it was at once artificial and artless, and touched with beauty only by the strong wind and by the subdued brightness due to the rain. Its breadth and variety were sufficient for it to respond — something as Exmoor or Mousehold Heath or Cefn Bryn in Gower would have responded — to the cloudily shattered light, the threats and the deceptions, and the great sweep of the wind.
But there was no one painting [36] those cold expanses of not quite lusty grass, the hard, dull gravel, the shining puddles, the dark gold-flecked gorse, the stiff, scanty trees with black bark and sharp green buds, the comparatively venerable elms of Bolingbroke Grove, the backs and fronts of houses of no value save to their owners, and the tall chimney-stacks northwards.
Perhaps only a solitary artist, or some coldish sort of gnome or angel, could have thoroughly enjoyed this moment. That it was waiting for such a one I am certain; I am almost equally certain that he could create a vogue in scenes like this one, which are only about a thousandth part as unpleasant as a cold bath, and possess, furthermore, elements of divinity lacking both to the cold bath and to the ensuing bun.
[bun?]
It is easier to like the blackbird's shrubbery, the lawn, the big elm, or oak, and the few dozen fruit trees, of the one or two larger and older houses surviving — for example, at the top of Burntwood Lane. The almond, the mulberry, the apple trees in these gardens have a menaced or actually caged loveliness, as of a creature detained from some world far from ours, if they are not, as in some cases they are, the lost angels of ruined paradises.
["the lost angels of ruined paradises" !]
The journey continues:
Burntwood Lane, leading down from a residential district to an industrial district, is no longer [37] as pretty as its name. Also, when it seems to be aiming at the country, it turns into a street of maisonettes, with a vista of houses terminated by the two tall red chimneys of the Wimbledon Electricity Works. But it has its character.
The Lunatic Asylum helps it with broad, cultivated squares, elms, and rooks' nests, and the voices of cows and pigs behind the railings that line it on the left hand from top to bottom.
On the right, playfields waiting to be built all over give it a lesser advantage. How sorry are the unprotected elms on that side! They will never be old. Man, child, and dog, walking in and out of them, climbing them, kicking and cutting them, have made them as little like trees as it is possible for them to be while they yet live.
They have one hour of prettiness, when the leaf-buds are as big as peas on the little side sprays low down. Then on a Saturday — or on a Sunday, when the path is darkened by adults in their best clothes — the children come and pick the sprays in bunches instead of primroses. For there are no primroses, no celandines, no dandelions outside the fences in Burntwood Lane.
1913-03-21-ET-sets off-In-Pursuit-of-Spring-1914.pdf [local chapter only]
Edward-Thomas-In-Pursuit-of-Spring-1914-complete.pdf [complete]
And it was also from Rusham Road that he left for France in 1916[?]
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