The Pains of Parting and a Father Says Farewell

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

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.