The acclaimed author Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) once wrote about Mapperley Plains, despite having not visited.
This was whilst he was at Repton School in Derbyshire in around 1920. Following on from a balloon release at a school event one day, a card for his balloon was returned to him from address given as ‘Mapperley Plains’. This conjured up the imagining of a romantic location that he did later visit on a book tour many years later.
As a young man, inspired by his initial dreamy imaginings of the location. He wrote this.
Mapperley Plains
By the swift ways of shade and sun
We trod the morning. Spring was white
And hushed in lovely pools of light —
But we were eager to have won
Mapperley Plains, so strange and fair;
Nor guessed what should await us there.
And strong noon bridged half Heaven in flame
And day swung down from blue to blue . . .
We marched untired, for we knew
Daylight could never be the same,
Or Glory half so glad, as when
The weird plains seize the hearts of men.
Their beauty is the sword that cleaves
Youth, royally lived in pride and laughter,
From blank, prosaic Age. Hereafter
A bright day’s ending . . . fallen leaves —
Mapperley Plains are years behind,
Their music dies within the mind.
Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screen-writer, autobiographer, and diarist. He was also homosexual and made this a theme of some of his writing. He was born near Manchester in the north of England in 1904, became a U.S. citizen in 1946, and died at home in Santa Monica, California in January 1986.
Isherwood was the grandson and heir of a country squire, and his boyhood was privileged. Nevertheless, he suffered the peculiarly English privations of distant parents, boarding school at eight, and the loss of his father in the Great War. In part as a riposte to his family circumstances, he formed, from his earliest years, intimate and creative friendships with a vast range of personalities from all walks and classes of life. With his school and university friend Edward Upward, he devised an imaginary world, Mortmere;
For more on Christopher Isherwood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood
