Welcome to the vulnerability corner, where I share ‘writings and scribbles’ of mine.

Here, again, Edith is the subject but I tried to tell it through trains and places. (I’ve been reading train poetry today and typically, I write poetry after reading it). Edith got a lot of trains in her life, living in London.

I searched Laura Thompson’s book (‘Rex vs. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders’, 2018) for mentions of trains. This is a story poem and several components are mentioned in Rene Weis’ book (see https://edithjessiethompson.co.uk/ The Story, Ch.2 & 3). Also there’s a film about Edith called Another Life (free on Amazon Prime, recommend), that worked its way in here too. While reading my train poems, I found ‘Corner Seat’ by Louis MacNeice (who according to one of my English tutors is the inspiration for a Muriel Spark story I read last year):

Suspended in a moving night

The face in the reflected train

Looks at first sight as self-assured

As your own face – But look again:

Windows between you and the world

Keep out the cold, keep out the fright;

Then why does your reflection seem

So lonely in the moving night?

Feel like this poem worked its way into mine. If anyone wants to read poems about trains the book I was reading is Train Songs: Poetry of the Railway (ed. Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson). Was also possibly inspired by a phone call a bloke answered once (see the 2nd Postscript in The Prince and the Show Girl & My Week with Marylin by Colin Clark, great read for film buffs by the way).

FROM ILFORD WITH LOVE

Darlint,

Do promise you will take me to Shanklin, so we can again rattle

Into that little station, and our dreams of a ‘tumble-down nook’.

Rather than my daily trudge to Fenchurch and Aldersgate –

Where he’s taken to following me –

I’ll change for Liverpool, Holborn and you and be free.

Mum told me how you jumped ship that

New Year’s Eve and caught the last late train to Fenchurch –

Darlint, was it to see me? – this was before the train to Shanklin and our ‘times’,

Darlingest boy, I’m tired of riding,

Chugging along secretly at night,

Shall we travel all of furtive London,

You and I, before he ‘lets me go’ and

We reach the coast and the promise of the sea.

Promise me we’ll trundle again, into that little station on a slope, back to

Shanklin, our ‘times’, and our ‘tumble-down nook’ by the sea.