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. The school organised a balloon release, where a card with the name and address was attacked to it. The card with his name on it 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 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 gay, and he made this a theme of some of his writing.
Born near Manchester, England in 1904, he moved to the United States and became a U.S. citizen in 1946. He died at the age of 82, at home in Santa Monica, California in January 1986.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Isherwood
