Springtime Reflections

Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring has always felt like a book that’s in pursuit of me. Published in April 1914, it traces the author’s cycle ride from London to the Quantocks one Easter weekend in search of the perfect English springtime. In doing so, he visits a number of the places of my life, from south London where I used to live, to Salisbury Plain where my father grew up and where Thomas sees ‘Saunderses’ buried in a graveyard, to such obscure places as the Lion and Fiddle pub in Hilperton in Wiltshire, where I once spent the night for a friend’s wedding. It is, to say the least, unnerving to find oneself preceded everywhere.

Thomas sometimes trades in this kind of spookiness, though, and usually when you least expect it. His short stories and essays are full of myths and uncanny experiences. As a writer he is now best known for his nature poetry, and In Pursuit of Spring certainly brims with his characteristically minute observations of his surroundings, such as this oak wood near Box Hill: ‘Sometimes the grey trunks were washed faintly with light, the accumulated branch-work proved itself purplish, and here and there the snick of a lost bough was bright.’

You can almost smell the sylvan air, and this is one of Thomas’s attractions. Born in the suburbs, his love of nature drove his devout wish to escape the noise and chaos of London. Like him, I have moved to the sticks and I feel he is speaking for me when he writes:

Many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not.

But Thomas’s writing is more than pastoral escapism. He often turns his retreat to the country into an assessment of himself and this is where In Pursuit of Spring becomes spooky, funny and also strangely wise. I am not the only person who repeatedly crosses Thomas’s path. The other major character apart from the author himself is the Other Man. He is a peculiar, mercurial figure who is first seen buying a chaffinch in order to set it free. This ludicrous wool-gatherer, a fellow wandering cyclist, is next seen sketching a weathervane in Morden while being jeered at by labourers and then, at greater length, in a pub in Salisbury. This isn’t the only time in Thomas’s writing that he conjures up a doppelgänger. His poem ‘The Other’ concerns a similar adventure, with the poet going from pub to pub in search of a mysterious version of himself who is, irritatingly, funnier and more popular than he is. In Pursuit of Spring, though, really runs with the whole concept. One wonders what his publishers thought when he submitted the manuscript – this was supposed to be a bucolic guide to the Quantocks, but they had on their hands something richer and stranger. The scene between the two men in the Salisbury pub is enthralling but totally unrelated to the central theme of the book. They discuss clay pipes, at extraordinary and fascinating length. First, the Other Man talks of the pipe industry; then Thomas talks of his own favourite pipes. The two men seem to have bonded, until we find that the Other Man has suddenly become bored by the whole subject:

The Other Man cared nothing for the matter. He awoke from the stupor to which he had been reduced by listening, and asked – ‘Did you see that weathervane at Albury in the shape of a pheasant?

Weathervanes are the Other Man’s true obsession. Just as Thomas bored him with his clay pipes, so he exasperates with his chain of observations on weathervanes: ‘And not long after this, I was asleep,’ Thomas says. This is a comic and very English vignette of the difficulties of conversation between new acquaintances – especially, no doubt, if you are a middle-class gentleman in Edwardian England, constrained by manners and upbringing as well as by your rather niche interests. The real importance of this section only becomes clear later. During their last extended conversation, it emerges that the Other Man is actually a reflection of the author himself. We find that the Other Man has been commissioned to write countryside books for £50 apiece, which is the trade that Thomas followed in the years leading up to the Great War. The narrator’s response is that of the non-writer: ‘That is a lot of money for such a book! . . . And you are lucky to get money for doing what you like.’ With a magical sleight of hand, Thomas transforms himself into a different character. He is no longer a writer (despite his name being on the cover) but a general member of the public happening to meet an author. That author is very much like Edward Thomas, a man with constant health worries, a man who writes because he has a family to support and feels he is nothing but a hack:

He rambled on and on about himself, his past, his writing, his digestion; his main point being that he did not like writing . . . He abused notebooks violently. He said that they blinded him to nearly everything that would not go into the form of notes; or, at any rate, he could not afterwards reproduce the great effects of Nature . . .

This impromptu interview culminates in the Other Man sitting on a sheep trough gloomily eating monkey nuts while Thomas enjoys the landscape of Cley Hill. Thomas obviously finds his own self-pity rather amusing. Is it any wonder that he comically bored himself to sleep in the pub in Salisbury? This Olympian level of self-deprecation says something important to me, though. Thomas is, humorously and whimsically, admitting that he takes himself too seriously. He is indeed lucky to get money for doing what he likes. Thomas had fought tooth-and-nail with his father to allow him to become a writer rather than a civil servant. He was fortunate enough to have his first book published very young so that he could strike out on his own. His main love in life was wandering the paths and lanes of England, and the prose works that were commissioned from him – lovely books such as The South Country and The Heart of England – not only allowed him to pursue that love but paid him well enough to support a wife and three children. In Pursuit of Spring sees Thomas recognizing his own ingratitude, and poking fun at himself for it. The Other Man is finally reduced to an absurd, skittish figure, who is last glimpsed riding off from Kilve church in Somerset having followed up an obscure Wordsworthian reference in a rather antic fashion: ‘There is no weather-cock,’ said the Other Man, laughing a little more freely and disappearing for the last time. He is comic, a little unsettling, rather lovable and apparently irrelevant to the main point of the book, which is Thomas’s exploration of a glorious English springtime. Thomas is making it clear that the book’s the thing. Writers should leave their bruised egos out of it – they only get in the way of the story. Without doubt Thomas’s good-natured chiding can be extended to all those occasionally complaining writers and arty types who are paid (perhaps not as much as they would like) for following their passions rather than slaving in offices and banks and factories and mines. I include myself in that number. As an antiquarian bookdealer I am taken all over the country by books and literature, to hundreds of delightful places where I meet warm and fascinating people and see the most wonderful treasures, yet I complain about the travelling and railway timetables. In Pursuit of Spring acts upon me rather like Robert Burns’s famous maxim: ‘O wad some Power the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!’ At the end of the book, the Other Man miles behind him, Thomas finds himself on the road to Bridgend and declares:

I had found Winter’s grave; I had found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time I was again at the Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditchsides and short on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchises everywhere in the lengthening grass . . .

Spring is everywhere, and it is glorious and full of hope, and we are living a good life. It is funny that it takes someone as doubting as Thomas to lift up the mirror and force me to make a proper appraisal: I have to admit, I do actually enjoy myself.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 61 © Chris Saunders 2019