I’ve written before about how the streets and houses in a place like Oxford have echoes of its literary past in hidden corners and unexpected places. Tolkien’s large family home on Staunton Road; Lewis’ semi-rural house on the edge of Headington (at least it was semi-rural when he lived there); the stone house down a leafy side path in Headington Village where Elizabeth Bowen lived until her 1935 move to London; the old limestone house on Brewer Street where Dorothy L Sayers was born.
Last week I stumbled across another tribute to a writer, but away from the respectable, leafy suburbs, or the elegant College residences. Near the bottom of Cowley Road, on a Victorian house of three levels, is a stone tribute to Edward Thomas. The house is nothing special to look at – weeds growing between stone cracks at the front of the house, and modern PVC windows fitted unsympathetically into spaces designed for wooden sash frames. Like many properties around there, it is probably divided up into student flats and let out at high prices.
To anyone who lives in Oxford, the words ‘Cowley Road’ will bring all sorts of connotations. I lived between Cowley and Iffley Roads for a number of years. The most common adjective is ‘vibrant’, which is a vague word often used euphemistically, both positively and negatively. The road is known for its festival, for its international cafés and restaurants. It has been a place for first-generation immigrants, but also a hang out for drug users and people on the fringes of society. As a result, if you spend any time on the Manzil Way area of Cowley Road, you will observe a curious and incongruous mix of observant Muslims walking to mosque, and down-and-out drug addicts grouping around the benches near the children’s play area.
Edward Thomas is a writer I stumbled across when I read some of his short stories. Next I read his poetry. He is famous for his poetry about the English countryside, and also famous for his death in the First World War. His poem Adlestrop is particularly beautiful, because it captures a quiet moment. One late June, a train stops at a small village station on the Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire border called Adelstrop (out of use since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s). No one gets off and no one gets on. It is, in other words, it’s a poem where nothing happens. But in that stillness, the details of sound and sight come to life. Far from nothing happening, the absence of activity allows the background features of the scene to come to the fore. As it is such a short poem I will include it below:
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.
My walk along Cowley Road, and seeing that small, stone reminder of a past life in such an unexpected place reminded me of how the past, and the figures who peopled it, are around us if we are willing to notice.
Russell Thompson 