Two quite different wartime farewells at Charing Cross Station: The first is from Vera Brittain on the eve of 1915:
At Charing Cross, with half an hour to wait for the last train to Purley, we walked together up and down the platform. It was New Year’s Eve, a bright night with infinities of stars and a cold, brilliant moon; the station was crowded with soldiers and their friends who had gathered there to greet the New Year. What would it bring, that menacing 1915?
Neither Roland nor I was able to continue the ardent conversation that had been so easy in the theatre. After two unforgettable days which seemed to relegate the whole of our previous experience into a dim and entirely insignificant past, we had to leave one another just a§ everything was beginning, and we did not know — as in those days no one for whom France loomed in the distance ever could know — when or even whether we should meet again. Just before the train was due to leave I got into the carriage, but it did not actually go for another ten minutes, and we gazed at one another submerged in complete, melancholy silence. – Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
The second is an unconventional twist on the classic scene of the soldier’s farewell – an unusually cynical take. Read it with a bitter sneer.
Outside Charing Cross
(2.35 p.m.)
1915 – Douglas Goldring
And then that agonizing time of waiting and waiting for the moment of departure to be over in Helen Mackay’s poem also from 1915.
Richard Jack (1866–1952) 1916
So sad.
Heartbreaking. Mackay’s poem about being desperate for the parting to happen – for the train to moving and the agonizing moment of separation over – rings so true.
All of them moving, in their own ways!