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– Coda: Breaking Away –

I n Pursuit of Spring was a forward-looking book. Telegraph poles thrum through Thomas’s arcadia as regularly as oaks and elms; the sounds of factories and city life are just as present as birdsong. Railways run beside the roads and canals he describes along his way. In 1913 his roads, he recorded, were ‘travelled by an occasional (but not sufficiently occasional) motor car’. The car was a warning, but also something to be documented: a premonition of an automobile-centric future. ‘Is this not the awakening of England?’ he concluded, a question that wasn’t entirely rhetorical.

Yet one thing of the near future he didn’t mention was the war. In In Pursuit of Spring he ignores the fortifications installed at Box Hill and Guilford in anticipation of invasion. He mentions the military encampments which still occupy Salisbury Plain, but offers no further comment on them. Perhaps it was a wilful lapse, for he surely knew what was coming. He was killed during the first day of the battle of Arras, on Easter Monday, 1917, four years, almost to the day, after he made his journey. His heart was stopped by the pressure-wave of a shell that also stopped his watch, yet left no mark on his body.

My pursuit of Thomas’s Spring was to be my last

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