Publishing my Edward Thomas

On Helen Thomas

There is to be a programme on Radio 4 this Sunday afternoon about Helen. The title is that of Edward's poem, And You, Helen.
I believe Helen is now attracting more attention than formerly, and more respect and admiration. sometimes I felt criticism of her was lacking in understanding and perhaps slightly misogynist.

Helen Thomas - using Helen's words.
Perhaps a quarter of the novel is written in the first person, telling 'Helen's version' of the last four years of Edward Thomas's life as she experienced it. I put 'Helen's version' in quotes because of course it is really my version pretending to be hers.
 I have her write a memoir, which I called 'Half a kiss, half a tear' from Thomas's poem 'Sowing.' I'd originally called it 'Like Memory's Sand', which I think a lovely phrase but deprived of meaning without the words that follow. See the poem below.
The problem with Helen is of course also the bonus - she had written her account of her life with Edward in the moving and still widely read works, As It Was and World Without End, collected as Under Storm's Wing.

 I was interested to read that the major Thomas scholar Edna Longley came to Thomas 's poetry after reading Helen's work. Michael Morpurgo chose it as a favourite Good Read.

   

Helen

Helen also wrote many hundreds of letters and if I tried to emulate her voice it is the voice of the letters, not  because they were contemporary rather than retrospective (after all 'Half a kiss, half a tear' is meant to be a memoir) but because they are less polished, more spontaneous and so more easy to contemporary ears than Helen's  prose in Under Storm's Wing. Sometimes it is rather too fulsome   and I do try to capture that from time to time.

 

But mostly it is sincere, vivid and moving and I know I can't attempt to  equal it . Look at this on their final parting:

 

 

"I sit and stare stupidly at his luggage by the walls. He takes a book out of his pocket. 'You see, your Shakespeare's Sonnets is already where it will always be. Shall I read you some?'; He reads one or two to me. His face is grey and his mouth trembles, but his voice is quiet and steady. And soon I slip to the floor and sit between his knees, and while he reads his hand falls over my shoulder and I hold it with mine.

'Shall I undress you by this lovely fire and carry you upstairs in my khaki overcoat?' So he undoes my things, and I slip out of them; then he takes the pins out of my hair, and we laugh at ourselves for behaving as we often do, like young lovers.

I hide my face on his knee and all my tears so long kept back come convulsively. I cannot stop crying My body is torn with terrible sobs. I am engulfed in this despair like a drowning man by the sea. My mind is incapable of thought. So we lay, all night, sometimes talking of our love and all that had been, and of the children, and what had been amiss and what right. We knew the best was that there had never been untruth betweeen us. We knew all of each other, and it was right. 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."

 

 

And here is the first part of the letter Helen wrote to Robert in March 1917:

 

High Beech
March z.
Late at night
[1917]

Dear Robert
What a bit of luck to get your letter at all. I thought all the mails had gone down in the Laconia, but evidently not. I'm so excited & happy about your splendid news, & I've already written to the dear man & told him, & to John Freeman to find out about those 'insists'. I feel sure it will be all right. I'm not at all sure that Edward Eastaway will consent to be Edward Thomas, but I will add my 'insists' to yours & hope for the best. Also I like the idea of your preface & feel sure he will too. It's all very good news & you sound as pleased & you knew we would be.
By now you will have heard from him. He's at Arras & expecting a hot time presently. I don't suppose I can tell you much about him may I. He's at present at head quarters as adjutant to a ruddy Colonel whose one subject is horse racing & jockeys & such & with whom our man gets on so well that the he's longing to be back at his battery, he's afraid the Colonel has taken a fancy to him & will keep him. It will probably mean promotion, but Edward wants the real thing & wont be happy till he gets it & what is one to do with such a poet. In a pause in the shooting he turns his wonderful field glasses on to a hovering kestrel & sees him descend & pounce & bring up a mouse. Twice he saw that & says "I suppose the mice are travelling now". What a soldier. Oh he's just fine, full of satisfaction in his work, & his letters free from care & responsibility but keen to have a share in the great stage when it begins where he is.
At first after we'd said 'Goodbye' & we knew what suffering was, & what we meant to each other, I did not live really, but just somehow or other did my work, but with my ears strained all the time for his step or his coo-ee in case he came back. But the one can only wait & hope & not let panic take a hold of one, his happy letters & the knowledge that all is so well between us, are making life life again, & the Spring helps too & the feeling that the end is near-must come soon, & that that end will be-if it is at all-a beginning again for us with such knowledge of each other as nothing can ever obliterate, nothing can ever, that is what we know & what makes life possible now.
I must tell you that [the] last evening we were talking of people of ourselves of friends & of his work & all he'd like done. And he said "Outside you & the children & my mother, Robert Frost comes next." And I know he loves you.
I send you this photograph. Merfyn took it. People don't like it because they say he is too much a soldier here, & not at his best. But I send it thinking that you know him so well you'll be able to read him into it, if he is not there to you. We too will send to Leslie. We are all well,& Merfyn has attested and will 'join up' when he is I8. Bronwen is happy & careless & so useful & willing. Baba is well & growing long  & clever & disconcerting often with her shrewd observation& her totting up of character. And I am just the same, & despite  all the terrible anxiety & terror in me, a great calm nothing can unruffle.
I'll leave this letter open for details to be added about the book.
Edward will be 39 tomorrow March 3rd, & we are hoping our parcels of apples& cake & sweets & such like luxuries will get to him on the day. Our letters take a week to reach him. Yours not much longer I expect. '