Through much of his life, the poet and critic Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) produced work which was informed, and often haunted, by the memory of his childhood in the village of Yalding, near Maidstone. This was despite the searing memory of the First World War, in which he fought and was injured, and then his move to Tokyo in the late 1940s, and Hong Kong for a decade from 1953 to 1964. Maybe it was because of these disruptive and dislocating experiences. Thought that implies a psychological response that is perhaps too neat and orderly. What is certain is that despite the fact that last time in his life in which he spent any significant time in the village, or in Kent for that matter, was 1931, to his death over four decades later, this area still mattered to him. Oblique references to it occur in his 1944 book, `Cricket Country.’ `I speak of almost forty years ago,’ he stated there. But with clarity he then goes on to describe the field set by for playing the game, `at the end of our sprawling parish, and the sportsmen [coming] together from secluded cottages far down lanes bordering the orchards and shaws and hop-gardens thereabouts.’(`Cricket Country’, St James’s Library, Collins, London, 1944, p12).
How it mattered is important to work out and why it left this mark, is important to work out, because his response and allegiance to the particular landscape, society and atmosphere of Kent is symptomatic of a number of other writers. Wholly by coincidence, a fellow poet also closely associated with the First World War, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), experienced their youth and schooling in nearby Matfield and Tonbridge. But the fact that Sassoon was a decade older than Blunden meant they did not know each other while they were living in Kent. Both were to produce memoirs detailing their experience of the war. But while for Blunden Yalding figures as a place referred to in his work in later years instilled with an almost bucolic but threatened innocence and purity, inhabited by an ancient stock of worthy and doughty characters, and described with surprising levels of specificity, for Sassoon while his memoirs are rich in detail, his poetry refers rarely to the landscape he grew up in.
According to `Edmund Blunden: A Biography’ by Barry Webb (Yale University Press, 1990), Blunden’s father, Charles Edmund, had been a pupil teacher in Maidstone in the 1880s before moving to London and marrying Margaret Tyler in 1895. Blunden was born in London a year later. He moved to Yalding at the age of four.
The poetry Blunden wrote during and immediately after the First World War, in addition to being in rich in references to his immediate situation and circumstances, often referred to the village he had only recently left. Much of that was nostalgic and admiring in register. In `The Waggoner’ from 1919, he wrote of the
`The odd light flares on the shadows vast
Over the lodges and oasts and byres
Of the darkened barn; the moment hangs wan
As though nature flagged all desires.
But in the dim court the ghost is gone
From the hug-secret yew to the penthouse wall
And stopping there seems to listen to
The Waggoner leading the grey to stall,
As centuries past itself would do.’
At a time when modernity was sweeping through literature in the form of T S Eliot and James Joyce’s work, Blunden’s allegiances were, in form and expression, more conservative. The aim though, like that of the radically different work of Joyce, was to show commitment to a place, and record feelings and attachments and emotions about that place. Yalding, after all, was a small settlement – no more than a few hundred people at the time, with the same almost static quality of many other similar villages in Kent, where the church, farm, school, pub and cricket team offered the main foundations of social and working life. Families were of long standing. Their ancestors could be found buried in the local graveyard. While there had been a rail line about a mile from the centre of the village since the middle of the 19th century, in Blunden’s era mobility would not have been great. Farm carts, not motor cars, were the norm. It was these that would have trundled across the lengthy Medieval Bridge that ran over the rivers Beult and the Teise connecting the two sides of the settlement together.
The warmth of Blunden’s memory, and the fact that he was to enjoy a career through Oxford, and then via the Times Literary Supplement into the cultural establishment in Britain, gives lie to the fact that it was clear his life in Yalding was not an easy one. His father taught at Cleaves Grammar School, at the head of the high street behind what is now the war memorial. The family lived in the schoolmaster’s house almost next to the church at the other end of the street, before the bridge. But as Webb points out, Blunden’s father `was not efficient in financial matters, regularly finding himself in debt, which resulted in bouts of nervous depression.’ (Webb, 12). In 1904, with the family increasing in size, they moved to Congelow, a rambling place a little outside the village, and then, as a result of more financial problems, to two smaller cottages just beside the Anchor Inn at Twyford Bridge, on the road to the station. By 1913, the family moved to Framfield. By this time, Blunden was already a boarding student at Christ’s Hospital in Horsham. He only returned to Yalding in 1931, during an interruption to this career, and then for just a few months.
In all, Blunden spent less than a decade of his life in Yalding. And yet, the memory of that period recurs in work he produced into the 1950s. This was not just a matter of describing the physical landscape. Blunden was also careful in capturing some of the figures he knew – not so much their language, and voices, but at least the meaning of their characters. `Almswomen’ from 1920 combines these, with its very specific reference to `Quincey’s Moat’ – possibly the large house now named as Wardes Moat’, and the two old dames living close by who `cling as close as any trueloves in the spring.’ `All things they have in common being so poor,’ the poem continues, `And their one fear, Death’s shadow at the door.’
Blunden had perhaps been promoted to adopt such a nostalgic, commemorative tone as much by the way his own life had moved on from the somewhat enclosed and protected nature of his infant existence in Yalding as by the devastating impact of the War. This he had written about memorably and powerfully in `Undertones of War’, a book still celebrated today. The war had ended the placidity of Edwardian England, shattering political and social structures. As the historian A J P Taylor remarked, `Until August 1914 a sensible, law abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman…. All of this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of people became, for the first time, active citizens.’ (A J P Taylor, `English History, 1914-1945’, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1965, 1-2). Blunden’s own marking of this was more lyrical:
`Something is lost, perhaps: the old
Simplicity of rustic wit
Is banished by the rude disdain
And pride that speaks a boorish brain,
The pride that kills the fear of it,
And strikes its kindness cold.’
(The Barn)
`The land,’ he wrote, around the same time, `lies like a jewel in the mind.’ (11th R.S.R.). It is hard to truly imagine the violation of the War and its impact on the spirits, and sense of security, of those who went through it, particularly people from a background like Blunden’s. `Forefathers’ was the best expression of this – a poem which strives to capture the essence of a changeless landscape and society which, despite all of this, had changed radically. Remembering those who went `with smock and crook/Toiled in the sun, lolled in the shade’, to marry and work, and who were now nameless, part of an ancient unremembered mass, Blunden continues:
`Unrecorded, Unrenowned,
Men from whom my ways begin,
Here I know you by your ground
But I know you not within-
There is silence, there survives
Not a moment of your lives.’
Blunden certainly invested the landscape of Yalding, and his recollection of it, with a meaning of comforting, but troubled, and troubling, continuity. His own life was to be restless. Yalding was clearly as much a place in the imagination as anywhere concrete and worth actually returning to to live. The memorial to his life there is contained now only in a small, but very beautiful, etched window by the great Lawrence Whistler, installed in the parish church in the late 1970s. James Joyce said that were Dublin to have vanished, it could be rebuilt simply by using references to the city in `Ulysses.’ The same could not be said of the disparate, but heartfelt, often fragmented, and primarily evocative references in Blunden’s work to Yalding. They refer more to an inner experience and interpretation of the meaning of a place from memories carried by one person of it. That implies a level of subjectively and of adornment and embellishment. There is Blunden’s Yalding, and the real Yalding. The two are, and always were, very different places �