HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD: THE FANTASY OF “BLIGHTY,” THE REALITY OF HOME

This paper examines the frequent use of the word ‘blighty’ in First World War poetry and prose to signify from the frontline trenches the longedfor world of home. A word of Anglo-Indian origin, the product of folk etymology, as unlettered soldiers convert ‘bilayati’ meaning ‘foreign’ into something that sounds more familiar in English, it retains its association with the speech of the common soldier in First World War poetry. It modulates in meaning, as the war gets increasingly desperate, and starts in poetry and elsewhere to refer to a relatively minor wound that will get you back home and out of the war. I examine this shift in a number of poets, notably Owen, Sassoon, and Gurney. I also examine the experience of ‘blighty’ from the other end of the telescope, so to speak. That is to say, from the perspective of women writers receiving their men at home and bidding them farewell for the last time. I illustrate such writing in the distinguished novel World Without End by Helen Thomas, the widow of the war poet Edward Thomas.