Adlestrop: a lost station, but words that still beguile100 years on, William Langley visits Adlestrop, scene of the 'unwonted^ stop that inspired Edward Thomas's much-loved poem
The old station sign and bench with the Edward Thomas poem etched onto a plaque Photo: Christopher Jones for The TelegraphA hundred years ago, a steam train carrying an unknown poet made an unscheduled stop at a Gloucestershire hamlet called Adlestrop. Absolutely nothing else happened.
Edward Thomas, aged 36 and bereft of inspiration, dutifully jotted the details of this fleeting non-event into his notebook, and from them fashioned a poem that has become not only one of the nation^s favourites, but also an authentic literary mystery.
Adlestrop, just 16 lines long, composed of simple words and observations, has been compared to the works of Elgar and Henry V^s speech before the battle of Agincourt. Its appeal is fiercely debated, but readers appear to find in it something incorporeally English, poignant and gripping.
Thomas never saw his verse in print. Three years after the fateful train journey, he was killed, serving as a second lieutenant with the British Army in France. Next month, however, his work will be commemorated in the place he made famous.
At first glance, Adlestrop (population 80), set in the velvety folds of the north Cotswolds, looks to have barely changed since 1914. There is no pub, no modern housing and the heady whiff of wood smoke and meadow blossom hangs over the only street ^ defiantly named Main Street. Today, though, its picture-pretty thatched cottages fetch colossal prices ^600,000 to a million-plus^ according to a local estate agent. Just up the lane is Lady Angela Bamford^s starry rustic gastro-palace, Daylesford Organic, and scattered in the hills around are the country houses of the infamous Chipping Norton Set.
The village, says postmaster and lifelong resident Ralph Price, 68, has no need ^ or wish ^ to trade on Thomas^s name, but hopes to use next month^s anniversary to set right some of the misunderstandings surrounding the poem and the myth it has created. ^We get lots of visitors who want to see the place as Thomas saw it,^ says Ralph, ^but, of course, he never did see it. And then they want to see the station, but that^s not there any more.^
Adlestrop station, a lost gem of Edwardian railway architecture, was closed in 1966, under the Beeching programme of cuts that wiped out much of Britain^s rural rail infrastructure. The trains still speed by on the London Paddington to Hereford route, but the spot where Thomas^s train drew up ^unwontedly^ is now derelict land, closed to the public and filled with scrap vehicles.
Mr Price^s father, Cyril, and grandfather, Albert, both worked at the station, which lies about a mile west of the hamlet. He still finds it hard to understand ^ or forgive ^ the way the closure was handled.
^They sent a work crew out who burnt down the buildings, the old goods shed, anything they couldn^t burn they demolished. Later they came and flattened the platforms, too, so you^d never know there ever was a station there. Some things were taken away and sent to Swindon. The village wasn^t consulted about anything. We asked if we could at least have the station signs, and British Rail said we could have one, but then they sent it to Honeybourne, down the line, and said if we wanted it we^d have to get it from there. It was as if they didn^t want there to be any memory of the place.^
One elderly, brown-and-cream Adlestrop sign now adorns the village bus shelter. The other is believed to have been sent to a museum near Oxford, where it was later destroyed.
^The station,^ recalls Ralph, ^was a big thing for the village. It was our playground when we were children. We^d help tend the flower beds, and herd the livestock when it came off the trains. The railwaymen were very proper back then. Always very smart and they wore flowers in their lapels, but they let you do things kids could never do now. We used to ride on the footplate down to Moreton-in-Marsh, the nearest town.^
At the time of his Adlestrop stop, Thomas, the son of a civil servant, was in an advanced state of self-torment. A modest career as a literary critic and journalist had served only to highlight what he saw as his own inadequacies as a writer. His marriage to the adoring Helen Noble was in trouble, undermined by his bouts of depression and sense of uselessness. To a friend^s suggestion that he should try his hand at poetry, Thomas gloomily replied: ^I couldn^t write a poem to save my life.^
Yet poetry did save his life ^ if only temporarily ^ for Thomas was close to suicide when, in 1913, he met the American poet Robert Frost, who persuaded him to give verse a try. Frost, a fellow depressive, spotted the hidden talent within the Englishman. ^It took me to tell him what his problem was,^ Frost wrote later. ^He was suffering from a life of insubordination to his inferiors.^
Thomas was on his way from London to Frost^s home near Ledbury on June 24 1914 when the train pulled up at Adlestrop. In his notebook he scribbled ^thro the willows cd be heard a chain of blackbird songs at 12.45, and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.^ The poem that resulted was a golden key, miraculously unlocking all the creative energies that Thomas had unconsciously suppressed, and a stream of dazzling work poured out of him.
^The poem has a sense of time and place that affects people very strongly,^ says Anne Harvey, a critic and editor of the anthology Adlestrop Revisted. ^I think it touches on a particularly English sensibility, the idea of being a traveller in an unfamiliar place, and, of course, it carries the overtones of the war coming, and that soon this peacefulness would be gone.^
In July 1915, Thomas enlisted to fight in the Great War. There was no requirement for him to join up. He was 37, married with three children, and could easily have stayed comfortably in his new West Country home fulfilling his new passion for poetry. In all likelihood he felt that the England he had so perfectly captured in Adlestrop was in danger, and he had to do his bit to defend it. On April, 9, 1917, the first day of the Battle of Arras, he was killed.
The organisers of next month^s commemorative day had hoped to hire a steam engine of suitable vintage to draw up beside the old station site, but according to Mr Price, the cost would have been ^40,000, and even a place as wealthy as Adlestrop can^t stretch to that. Instead Great Western is loaning a diesel, from which a celebrity ^ as yet unnamed ^ will read the poem.
Thomas, as Ralph says, never set foot in Adlestrop. The train stop was brief. ^No one left and no one came.^ Which, by and large, is how the village still prefers it.
Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas
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.
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