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| The Great Offensive, Samuel Begg (Illustrated London News, 1916) |
In 1918, shortly after the death of her brother on the Western Front, Marjorie Wilson wrote an elegiac poem that tried to make sense of the tragic loss. The poem was published in the Spectator on October 26, 1918, just seven months and three days after Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson was killed during his unit’s withdrawal from Hermies.
To Tony—Aged 3
In Memory (T.P.C.W.)*
Gemmed with white daisies was the great green world
Your restless feet have pressed this long day through—
Come now and let me whisper to your dreams
A little song grown from my love for you.
. . . . . . .
There was a man once loved green fields like you,
He drew his knowledge from the wild birds' songs,
And he had praise for every beauteous thing,
And he had pity for all piteous wrongs ....
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| T.P. Cameron Wilson |
And brother to her sunlight—to her rain—
Man, with a boy's fresh wonder. He was great
With greatness all too simple to explain.
He was a dreamer and a poet, and brave
To face and hold what he alone found true.
He was a comrade of the old—a friend
To every little laughing child like you.
. . . . . . .
And when across the peaceful English land
Unhurt by war, the light is growing dim
And you remember by your shadowed bed
All those—the brave—you must remember him;
And know it was for you who bear his name
And such as you that all his joy he gave—
His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life,
To win that heritage of peace you have.
—Marjorie Wilson
The love and admiration that Marjorie Wilson feels for her brother is evident in references to his vocation as a school teacher and to his poetry (Magpies in Picardy was published posthumously by the Poetry Bookshop in 1919). And the poem shimmers with tenderness for the young boy Tony, as she whispers to his dreams “A little song grown from my love for you.”
Many readers have assumed that Tony is Marjorie’s son, but she served during the war as VAD nurse (unlikely if she had a young son), and she never married. She is buried in Blaxhall, Suffolk, where her father was a rector from 1928 until Marjorie’s death in 1934.**
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| Marjorie Wilson Memorial, Blaxhall, Suffolk |
Perhaps Tony was the son of another of TPC Wilson’s five siblings? His sister Alice (born in 1889) served during the war with the Duchess of Sutherland’s nursing staff in France, making it unlikely that she was married or a mother at the time of her brother’s death (although she later married Arthur Thorne). And Charles, born in 1899, was most probably too young to have had a son born in 1914 or 1915. Yet it is possible that either Christopher (born in 1883) or John (born in 1890) named a son after their brother.***
But there is another possibility suggested by a manuscript written in pencil that was found with TPC Wilson’s effects after his death and published in 1920 as Waste Paper Philosophy. The philosophical musings left behind by the twenty-eight-year-old soldier were dedicated “To my son.” In the introduction to Waste Paper Philosophy, Robert Norwood writes, “Like Rupert Brooke, who held it his greatest loss to die without a son, Wilson lets the world feel his longing for the boy to come after him in these last words” (viii).
Yet in Waste Paper Philosophy, Wilson repeatedly and directly addresses his son, at times noting that the child is young: “Go on building, my son, go on building, for nothing on earth begins or ends suddenly” (29); “An uncle of yours once lived to tell the Scotch Manager of a Sugar Plantation exactly what he thought of him” (32); “God help you, little son, if you are trodden under those well satisfied hoofs of authority” (32); “Look for the soul of things, son” (40).
One of the poems published in Magpies in Picardy also addresses a “little son” (“The Mathematical Master to His Dullest Pupil”). Additionally, several previously unpublished poems of Wilson’s are added to Waste Paper Philosophy, including “The Silver Fairy.” This poem begins, “Listen to me, my son,” and proceeds to conversationally share a vision the soldier in the field experiences:
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| Peter Pan, Arthur Rackham |
And I was smoking a pipe in the sun,
I saw you breasting the bank at a run
I mean the band where the turf goes down
Goes down and up till it ends in a crown
Of yellow chrysanthemums nodding their heads
Over the last of the garden beds,
I saw the last because just beyond
Is weeds and snails and the duckety pond.
It’s a fantastical vision, as the boy is accompanied by a silver fairy astride his neck, but there is a charming specificity in the description of a young child’s running play.
Perhaps Wilson’s philosophical writings were dedicated to an imagined son he might have had one day, but it’s not impossible that the child was real. In the final philosophical musing of the penciled manuscript, Wilson writes,
I think that sometimes the most loyal of women must doubt her man, must think herself false to his memory because she cannot fit a halo to his funny old head. I know those who live among the naked truths of war cannot pretend that the man they have loved and who has been killed by their side was a saint because he was dead.... Think of your dead friend (of your dead father, my son, when the time comes) as moving, sweating, struggling always, his sins, his laughter, his nastiness, his kindness, his stupidities as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes. Never complete, always developing in one direction or another, moving, moving, moving. ‘Working out his own salvation.’ .... Expect no man to be a saint, but when you find a saint reverence him as you love the sun. And because death has closed his hand over a sinner do not think that his sins have been frozen on him for eternity. He is not petrified like the corpses of Pompeii. He goes on, my son,—surely he goes on.
His sister’s poem “To Tony, Aged 3” is the last poem in Waste Paper Philosophy, and to it has been added the title “L’Envoi,” a title often used for the last poem in a collection that adds explanatory or concluding remarks.
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*This is the version of the poem that appears in T.P.C Wilson’s Waste Paper Philosophy (1920). In that publication, the title “L’Envoi” has been added.
**Those wishing to know more about Marjorie Wilson's last days can read Arthur Mee’s account in The King’s England: Enchanted Land (Hodder and Stoughton, 1936, pp. 182–184).
***I’d be grateful if anyone with knowledge of the family could provide further information.
