Edward Thomas on The Somme ...... by Miriam Halahmy

This is my first blog post of 2014 and it is the year which marks the centenary of the outbreak of WW1. So it seems both apt and edgy to write a post about my visit to the Somme last summer and my pilgrimage to the grave of one of our greatest poets, Edward Thomas.

 My brother Louis, a keen photographer and also with a great interest in  WW1, drove us to stay in Arras as our base for visiting the battlefields. 

I knew that Edward Thomas was buried nearby. I had been reading about Thomas almost obsessively for two years; biographies, books by Eleanor Farjeon who was in love with him, poetry by Thomas and Robert Frost with whom he had a great and influential friendship and I had seen a play about them all at the Almeida Theatre. Thomas is thought to have walked more than any poet since Wordsworth and he went to war to save the countryside of England which he covered inch by inch during his too brief lifetime.

 It was a beautiful July morning when we drove to Agny Cemetery where Thomas is buried. The cemetery is just a few miles south of Arras, and probably only a few hundred yards from the trench where he was killed by a stray bullet on April 9^th 1917, on the first day of the Battle of Arras, Easter Monday.

 In his notebook the day before he was killed, Thomas wrote a few notes :-

The light of the new moon and every star

And no more singing for the bird...

I have never understood quite what was meant by God

The morning chill and clear hurts my skin while it delights my mind

As we walked along a path towards the graves, poppies were nodding bright red amongst the high green corn and tears were welling in my eyes.

Thomas’s grave is well cared for as are all the graves in all the British cemeteries we visited. The War Graves Commission has honoured our dead as we should wish it.

I stood in front of the stone and read the last three stanzas of Thomas' two page long poem,

Roads

Now all roads lead to France

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude

Edward Thomas

Over the next two days as we drove and walked around the Somme and saw the cemeteries, memorials, craters and trenches and collected pieces of ordnance which still surface in the fields, I wrote in my notebook, as a writer must do.

Here is my poem: :-

Agny Cemetery  early morning  July

The corn is high and green

poppies blare their old familiar red.

Today I am a poet on the Somme.

I find your grave and choke back tears

read aloud the lines which open,

... Now all roads lead to France...

We know you Thomas, your beauty,

your black mood, striding step across the Downs.

We know who loved you, Helen, Eleanor, Robert.

But to your left lies Soldier of the Great War

the white stone empty except for Kipling’s line

Known Only to God.

No-one comes to weep for him

read poetry and sigh

wish that he had lived.

I close my book to silence;

only the wind in the pine

and the quiet grass nestling at your feet.

© Miriam Halahmy

Throwing my hat in the ring by Miriam Halahmy

 I love the way the English language is constantly evolving. I’m writing a poem about it at the moment and how my generation simply didn’t have words like partner, black, celebrity and the only X we knew was in x-ray.

So I must admit that I am rather relishing the new word on the Y.A. block – Sicklit. 

Pretty cool, you must admit and definitely edgy.

 I’ve started to trawl back through my entire canon  *grins* to see if any of my published works can be categorised under sicklit. 

Depending on your point of view, probably all of it to be honest. I’ve written about torture, near drowning, human rights ( well it is a gritty issue), drugs, dysfunctional families, child death, self harming, lying to the police, cancer....

elective mutism,  racism, bullying..... nuff said.

But above all, I have written about characters with powerful emotions, coping with real life, like walking the dog, cooking and shopping, doing a newspaper round, falling in love, bitching with your mates, laughing with your mates, teachers, parents, falling in love, being a sibling, falling in love.... yes, I love writing teenage romance and for me, this is going to be placed at the heart of all my books, whatever the obstacles I am putting before my characters.

Love makes the world go round and everyone from the tiniest baby experiences some kind of love. So if my published works contain hard to handle issues, you can be sure that they are set within strong characters, a good dash of humour, a lot of loving and always a positive way forward on the closing pages. I like all my stories to end on hope – it keeps me going and I want my readers to feel that life always holds out hope.

Sicklit is a great word – but I don’t think we are yet at all sure what it really means. That’s what is so wonderful about language – it’s always changing.

Tell The Edge what you think!

Taking a risk at Stanage Edge ......... Miriam Halahmy

One of my excuses for writing contemporary gritty teen fiction is that I convince myself it gives me the licence to revisit the risks of my youth. So in my current cycle of novels set on Hayling Island I have teenagers falling into dangerous seas, riding motorbikes and going rock climbing.

I’m working on the edits to the third book in the cycle, Stuffed, at the moment, which is why my rock climbing days on the gritstone edges of Derbyshire such as Stanage Edge, are very much on my mind. I’ve sent my characters off to Derbyshire on a freezing cold weekend in November. Their leader is nineteen year old Max who has had a lot of experience but none of the others have ever climbed before. That means extreme, scary, risky and ultimately a mega-accident. Great fun!

To write these chapters I had to do some serious research of course. I spent quite a bit of time at the climbing walls in North London, watching beginners and speaking to more experienced climbers.

This is Mark 'Zippy' Pretty setting a new climb on the wall at Swiss Cottage, North West London. He's one of the UK top climbing instructors.

I then took myself off to Derbyshire for a couple of days, taking photos, asking millions of questions about equipment and watching climbers abseil, overcome terror and sometimes, skid back down to the ground again.  It was all great fun and I came home with enough notes to write my chapters. 

I even wrote a poem.

Severe at Stanage Edge               

There are three kinds of sweat;

effort sweat as you jam upwards, hand over hand,

inching the crack, feet skintight in rock shoes.

A curlew calls overhead, you tip,

feel the hallucinatory pull of gravity

the easy fall, effort done,

nothing coming up to meet you

but ground. Then in reverse,

cheek pressed to the grazing rockface,

you breathe, damp all the way to the fingertip

and you’re in prickly sweat;

flowing like a river from armpit to bra,

drenching pants, knees, socks,

until fear sweat breaks out.

This is the worst, when you know the rock rules

and it’s not fear of height or the fall

but of failing at the crux

if you don’t go for it, have it and to hell with gravity.

This is climbing, this is vertical, nothing comes close.

©  Miriam Halahmy

What risks do you take when you write?