Yes. I remember Adlestrop –  

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

Now we all remember Adlestrop because of Edward Thomas’s evocation of England’s countryside in high summer: the silence, the flowers, the “hay-cocks dry.” Then suddenly a blackbird sings. And all the birds from counties far and near begin to sing.

Gerald Finzi, in his earliest extant piece of pastoral music, was inspired by a poem by Thomas. The two men were a generation apart and they never met; but there are striking echoes between their lives. They both lived in Hampshire; they both drew their greatest inspiration from the English countryside. When wars came, both men, though in separate wars, threw themselves into the common struggle almost with relief, as if escaping from the isolation of their creative lives. 

Strangely, in war their creativity flourished.

In her two remarkable books ‘As It Was’ and ‘World Without End,’ Helen Thomas recalls, always with compassion, the depression her husband had suffered all his life. As the First War got under way, he saw the road he must take, and his depression vanished. “Now all roads lead to France,” he said, and joined the army. He started writing poetry, pouring it out over the next two years, ‘till a bullet stopped his song.”

The family histories touch again during the Second World War. The Finzis chose the same school for their children as Helen Thomas had chosen for hers forty years earlier: Bedales. Edward had called the Bedales people charlatans full of the latest fads. Now Gerald only called them “cranky,” and hoped they would be kinder to his children than his own school had been to him.

Wartime shortages meant children’s clothes at Bedales were handed down. By pure chance Christopher Finzi was handed down the school jacket of Edward Thomas’s grandson.

“Till a bullet stopped his song” is from Alun Lewis’s poem on Thomas, written in an army camp during the Second World War. By a tragic irony, Lewis never made it home either. He was killed in 1944.

“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,” said Thomas. That sweet-smelling past let him lean out of the train window at Adlestrop station and breathe in the English countryside. There’s no station at Adlestrop now, and train windows are all sealed tight.

Agricola