‘The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence’ [Edward Thomas]
I start not with a meeting but a last goodbye.
Helen Thomas, the wife of the poet Edward Thomas, set down one of the most astonishing accounts of parting in her memoir ‘World Without End’. It can stand alongside even her husband’s greatest poetry.
She recalls in heartrending detail the last day, the last hours, the last minutes she spent with him before he left for the Western Front in 1917, never to return.
He takes a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets from his pocket, a gift from Helen, and reads them to her, ‘his mouth trembling’.
‘So talking and crying and loving in each other’s arms, we fell asleep as the cold reflected light of the snow crept through the frost-covered windows.’
Finally, standing at the gate of her home, she recalls watching him continually turn back to wave to her, until he disappears into the morning mist and hills.
The photograph of Helen found on Edward Thomas’s body when he was recovered from the battlefield.
After I had read this account, by chance, I discovered this archive recording of Helen, aged 90, speaking of her earliest memories of first meeting her husband. Again, there is a book, this time a book of birds, that Thomas lends to Helen. Again, the hills of the English countryside, but here as playground, as innocent setting for their love. All the ‘colour and warmth and sound’ longed for in the final day are so present here. The memory of his handshake as vivid as if it happened yesterday; so beautifully described even the reader can feel it.
So, for a moment time folds away and they are back in that happier, innocent England, lost together in the peaceful country lanes, before WW1.
