Shell WWI Literature

WW I Literature:

The Aftermath : Helen Thomas

Extract from ‘Time and Again’, Memoirs and Letters By Helen Thomas, wife of Edward Thomas.

Helen Thomas recalls her visits to the poet Ivor Gurney.

IVOR GURNEY

I think it was about 1932 that I had a letter from a woman whose name was strange to me. She was

Marion Scott, but as I did not move in musical circles I did not know that she was distinguished in that

world. The subject of her letter was strange to me for the same reason. I was therefore filled with surprise

and pity when she told me that she was the champion and friend of a young musical genius named Ivor

Gurney. This young man had lost his reason in the war and was in a lunatic asylum. He passionately loved

my husband’s work and was deeply interested in anything to do with him. Indeed Edward Thomas’s name

– for Ivor Gurney had never met him though they had been near each other at the front in France – evoked

in him what one can only call love. She wrote saying that if I could face the ordeal of visiting him, she felt

such indirect contact with Edward would mean more to him than we could imagine. So it was arranged that

I should go. I met Miss Scott at Victoria Station and I had my hands full of flowers.

On the journey to Dartford she told me about him, how he came of a very humble Gloucestershire family,

how he had always been highly sensitive and eccentric and that those fit to judge thought him a musical

genius. How his mind – always on the borderline – had quite given way at the front and how he had tried

more than once to take his own life.

We arrived at Dartford Asylum which looked like – as indeed it was – a prison. A warder let us in after

unlocking a door, and doors were opened and locked behind us as we were ushered into the building. We

were walking along a bare corridor when we were met by a tall gaunt dishevelled man clad in pyjamas and

dressing gown, to whom Miss Scott introduced me. He gazed with an intense stare into my face and took

me silently by the hand. Then I gave him the flowers which he took with the same deeply moving intensity

and silence. He then said, ‘You are Helen, Edward’s wife and Edward is dead.’ And I said, ‘Yes, let us talk

of him.’

So we went into a little cell-like bedroom where the only furniture was a bed and a chair. The window was

high and barred and the walls bare and drab. He put the flowers on the bed for there was no vessel to put