TRAVEL
Sheila Hetherington is reminded of a lazy summer afternoon before the world changed forever
Willows, willowherb and grass…A day or two ago I waited for half an hour on the small, otherwise almost empty, platform at Evesham, to board a train to London and a return to Scotland. I felt dreamy, indolent, vaguely conscious of pleasurable warmth and lively birdsong. Something reminded me – perhaps the terrain, which was a profusion of willowherb, meadowsweet and untamed grasses, on the banks beyond the platform – that the village of Adlestrop could not be far away.
Adlestrop: immortalised by the poet Edward Thomas in his evocation of a hot, lazy summer afternoon at the end of June 1914, when his express train halted unexpectedly and without explanation at the little station at Adlestrop. ‘No-one left and no-one came on the bare platform.’ The engine of his train hissed. He listened to a blackbird close by, ‘and round him, mistier, farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’
I link Edward Thomas with his near contemporary, George Butterworth, whose lyrical music, such as ‘Banks of Green Willow’ and ‘A Shropshire Lad’ evokes and inhabits a similar landscape of Englishness, and of that lost world of 95 summers ago. Viewed from the perspective of life today, that world seems to have been idyllic – a slow, gentle world of ripening cornfields, of horse-driven ploughs, of milk in churns, of children in white pinafores and hats, of endless sunshine.
It was not, of course, idyllic. There was grinding poverty. Many people lived in miserable conditions, others suffering deep personal anxieties. Terrible wars had come and gone throughout recorded time. But it seems as if the years before that year of 1914 define an innocent age: an age before this planet became ‘global’, descended into insane periods of horrendous violence, its population becoming ever more cruel, more greedy, an age before too much knowledge on the part of mankind became irreversible and uncontrollable, with an ability to destroy itself at the touch of a button. Perhaps remarkably, however, most of us live gratefully, gladly, optimistically, with personal delight – and for much longer.
Both Thomas and Butterworth, with nine million other young men, were about to lose their lives in the war that was only weeks away when the express train stopped suddenly that afternoon at Adlestrop.
SCOTLAND’S MODEST
HERO
Comment:
Kenneth Roy pays tribute to a ‘true gentleman’
[click here]
THE
SECTARIAN STIGMA
Religion:
R D Kernohan challenges the PC view
[click here]
JUST
LIKE
BARBADOS
Photo essay:
Part I of Islay McLeod’s Hebridean journey
[click here]
THE END
OF
TRUST?
Ethics:
Walter Humes
on professional liars
[click here]
EVICTED
BY THE CLIMATE
Environment:
Ciara Kirrane on the fate of Santa Rosa de Aguan
[click here]
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