Talbot House
Talbot House is a bit of England on the Western Front: dry humour, hot tea and green grass.
It is located in the Belgian town of Poperinge, close enough to the front lines to have been accessible to soldiers on leave but “not so near as to be positively ruinous,” says Rev. Tubby Clayton, the British army chaplain who founded the rest house during the war. “It became metropolitan not by merit but by the logic of locality.”
With a few days’ leave, soldiers would make the 10-kilometre trek west to spend a night in the “jolly gay” town, watch a Chaplin movie and stay in the finely appointed house off the town square. “Downstairs, there was always a party going on, with lots of soldiers coming and going,” said Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of the Great War during a visit back to Talbot House in 2002, when he was 104. He had come here three times.
Today, the check-in procedure is a two-coffee affair. First, a Belgian registration form, then € 43 for the room, then a separate transaction for the tourist tax and then the deposit for a huge key with key chain, on which is inscribed “No Scrounging.”
On their visits to Talbot House, soldiers would play games, read books or gather round the piano, where sheet music for “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” remains at the ready.
How wonderful to come, how terrible to leave.
“Downstairs there was always a party.”
HARRY PATCH
BRITISH SOLDIER