In the course of my work, I am occasionally called upon to visit the village of Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, serviced by the nearby railway station of Cheddington. I have boarded and alighted trains here on perhaps a dozen occasions (the latest being just a couple weeks ago) and on not one occasion have I ever met another soul on its platforms. I guess it’s because I travel there off-peak and it’s no doubt totally different at rush-hour when the commuters leave and return to their rural homes, but it puts me in mind of the poem Adlestrop by the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917), one of the Dymock poets whom we last visited when I wrote about Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier here.
The poem is based on a railway journey on the Cotswold line Thomas took on 24th June 1914, during which his train briefly stopped at Adlestrop in Gloucestershire (a station long closed down, one of the many victims of the Beeching cuts in the sixties). Thomas recorded the occasion in his notebook, writing that the train, from Paddington to Malvern, had stopped at Adlestrop at 12:15. He recorded his observations of the grass, the wildflowers, the blackbirds and the silence interrupted only by the hiss of steam at the stop. The poem itself was written a few months later. Since then, the poem has become a popular symbolic piece due to its simple references to a peaceful era and location just before the outbreak of the Great War.
Thomas enlisted the following year, and was killed soon after he arrived in France, at the Battle of Arras, in 1917. His poem was published in the New Statesman, just three weeks after his death. One hundred years to the day after the original journey, an “Adlestrop Centenary Special” Cotswold Line train was arranged, carrying 200 passengers from Oxford to Moreton-in-Marsh and stopping at Adlestrop in the place where the station formerly stood. Adlestrop village also held a celebration to mark the centenary, with a public reading of the poem by actor Robert Hardy. The old railway sign can still be seen in the village’s bus-stop.
Here is Thomas’s simple but elegant poem; knowing it was written just before the war that changed everything might quietly break your heart.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
