*
Collapsing masonry brought about expulsion from his Thames-side Eden. Heavy winds in December 1865 felled one of The Mount’s chimneystacks. It was the excuse Uncle John Grahame needed to convince Mrs Inglis that moving was imperative.
With a heavy heart, Mary Inglis concurred. The Mount was sold and she accepted the offer of a lease on Fern Hill Cottage, Cranbourne, a dozen miles southeast of Cookham Dean. The move took place the following spring, around the time of Kenneth’s birthday. With neither The Mount’s large garden nor the ‘Gallery’ attic, and beyond easy reach of the river, Fern Hill Cottage became seven-year-old Kenneth’s sixth home. What he thought about it can only be inferred from his silence, since no mention of it survives in his published work or his letters. The move coincided with the point – identified later – at which his memory ceased.
There were further upheavals in store. Cunningham Grahame wrote to request the return of his children from his mother-in-law. Again Mrs Inglis concurred. The children made the long journey by train, accompanied by Ferguson, ‘through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges… till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air streamed in through the windows’, and so back, once more, to the big new granite house in Inveraray where their mother – and a portion of their childhood – had died.24
Whatever Cunningham Grahame’s wishes, his resolve proved inadequate to the task of parenting singlehandedly. Over the course of 1866, his good intentions fell victim to his drinking. He could not manage the four young children so desperately in need of parental reassurance. He could no longer manage the responsibilities of the position of sheriff substitute. He gave up both, with little choice in either decision. Through his resignation he forfeited the house overlooking the loch. He did not look for another, but left Inveraray for France and an unlovely boarding house in Le Havre, where Grahame, Currie and Spens had an outpost, and twenty twilight years tutoring for small beer. He left behind Helen, Willie, Kenneth and Roland and made no attempt to contact them again.
The children returned to Mrs Inglis and the confines of Fern Hill Cottage. David Inglis’s absence, following his marriage in 1866, added to the bleakness of their ‘home’-coming. However limited their understanding, the three older children had all witnessed something of their father’s ignominy, though none ever spoke of it. In secret Helen began to write poetry. Kenneth’s response made its way into print three decades later. ‘Grown-up people really ought to be more careful. Among themselves it may seem but a small thing to give their word and take back their word… But with those who are below them, whose little globe is swayed by them, who rush to build star-pointing alhambras on their most casual word, they really ought to be more careful.’25
Among the figures that dominate Kenneth’s non-fiction essays, published after Cunningham’s death, is the man who runs away – an enduring source of fascination. Surprisingly the author treats him leniently. In the stories of Edward, Selina, Charlotte, Harold and the unnamed narrator, he grants fewer concessions. In these stories adults are ‘hopeless and incapable’, commanding no respect, blind ‘to anything but appearances’: a ‘strange anaemic order of beings’ further removed from children ‘than the kindly beasts who shared our natural existence in the sun’.26 They are ‘the Olympians’, an honorific bitter in its irony. None of the five children laments a father’s absence. More unexpectedly, the stories contain no idealization of a mother’s role, and their substitute mothers – obtuse, unthinking Aunt Eliza and Miss Smedley the governess – scarcely impact upon their charges; Aunt Eliza is an object of exasperation or contempt. In spirit, Kenneth’s fictional children are autonomous and independent, as orphans must become. But they are not invulnerable. They are ‘entirely at [the Olympians’] mercy… their butt, their martyr, their drudge’.27 When it occurs, unhappiness is strong enough to last a lifetime. ‘The crude blank misery of a moment,’ Kenneth wrote in 1895, ‘is apt to leave a dull bruise which is slow to depart, if it ever do so entirely.’28
• 3 •
‘Rubs and knocks and competition’
‘THIS STRANGE UNKNOWN thing called school,’ Kenneth wrote, in a story in which the eldest of his five fictional children, Edward, departs, bowler-hatted, by train for life outside the nursery, ‘had always been before us as an inevitable bourne.’1 Neither Willie nor Kenneth can have doubted its inevitability. Boys’ boarding school was a rite of passage for the Victorian middle classes, as it would remain. And Fern Hill Cottage was smaller than The Mount to accommodate Mrs Inglis and her servants and four growing children and their nurse.
The new St Edward’s School in Oxford, which opened in 1863, recommended itself to sensible Uncle John Grahame on account of its cheapness. Fees were set at £25 a year, ‘within the reach of parents of moderate means’, as its founder intended.2 In place of the gentlemanly leisure targeted by better-known schools, it prepared its leavers for employment. Kenneth arrived in the autumn of 1868, aged nine and a half.
To date his education had consisted of the usual home schooling in the nursery, delivered by whichever forgotten preceptor also taught Helen and Willie. Latin lessons with a local clergyman supplemented the nursery grounding in maths, reading and the more colourful aspects of the humanities – what Kenneth dismissed as ‘geography… arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings and queens’.3 He taught himself passages of Shakespeare, Macaulay and Tennyson, which he learned by heart and, like his father, declaimed on his walks in the country round Cranbourne, to Helen’s irritation. And perhaps, like the boy in ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, he ‘spent much of his time buried in big volumes that he borrowed from the affable gentry and interested parsons of the country round about’.4 His siblings considered him intelligent if odd. He read omnivorously, a trait he subsequently – mistakenly – attributed to every young reader.5
Mrs Inglis had not brought up her grandchildren in isolation. Before and after the terrible return to Inveraray there were visits from family members, including a younger cousin, Reginald Inglis, who attached himself to Kenneth, disliking Helen and Willie. A fraternity of uncles made forays to Berkshire; Kenneth called them a ‘tribe’, suggesting savagery. The children’s favourite was a commander of HMS Hercules, Uncle Jack Inglis, stationed at Plymouth. Mrs Inglis Helen described as ‘very sociable’. Social calls were made to and from The Mount and, after, Fern Hill Cottage. Kenneth remembered staid, irksomely formal visits to admire friends’ gardens – ‘company manners, and perhaps tedious talk of delphiniums and green fly and such’.6 From cousins, uncles, callers or garden owners, reliable information about school was in short supply. Accounts conflicted. ‘According to some it meant larks, revels, emancipation, and a foretaste of the bliss of manhood. According to others… it was a private and peculiar Hades, that could give the original institution points and a beating.’7 Kenneth would find it a mixture of the two. His description of a new boy at school in an essay called ‘The Fairy Wicket’ is poignant, redolent of fear: ‘his unfledged skin still craving the feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle’.8
Afterwards he treated his arrival in this unknown, would-be grown-up environment lightheartedly. There is little doubt that, at the time, ‘new kicked out of his nest into the draughty, uncomfortable outer world’, the experience unnerved him thoroughly.9 ‘On or about Michaelmas Day 1868, a bright and eager (sullen, reluctant, very ordinary-looking) youth of nine summers sprang lightly (descended reluctantly, was hauled ignominiously) onto the arrival platform of the Great Western Railway Station at Oxford.’10 In Kenneth’s version, it was a solitary test of nerve. It seems likely that Willie, one year his senior and also a pupil at St Edward’s, accompanied him. Although Kenneth later referred to the ‘rightminded child [that] regarded an elder brother as a veritable god’, he excluded Willie from his account, an exercise in rhetorical flourish with an emphasis on his feelings more than a strict record of fact.11<
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By hansom cab – ‘extraordinarily shabby… the worst and oldest [hansom] ever seen’ – this nervous new boy made the short journey into the middle of Oxford and ‘a pleasant, quiet street, central and yet secluded’. New Inn Hall Street connected George Street to Queen Street, a cobbled and unpretentious dogleg of small white gabled cottages, a vicarage and medieval Frewen Hall. Since its founding, St Edward’s had occupied Mackworth House, a building leased from Brasenose College that Kenneth estimated at no more than 150 years old; its state of dilapidation was chronic. With characteristic focus on his surrounds, he noted its rickety charm – not so far removed from that of The Mount. In an essay called ‘The Spell of Oxford’, written at the very end of his life, his descriptions point to picturesqueness: ‘a pleasant low wide hall’; ‘a low but well-lighted eastward-facing room used as a dining room’; by way of principal schoolroom, in which each boy had a desk of his own, ‘a handsome room of some style, running up the full height of the building to a coved ceiling’; ‘rabbit-warrenish’ bedrooms each home to five or six boys. In ‘The Fairy Wicket’, written when his memories were sharper, the school is ‘barrack-like’, the classrooms ‘arid, cheerless’.12
As he chose to remember it, his first summons was to the masters’ sitting room upstairs, overlooking the playground. There, ‘a round and rosy young man with side-whiskers… desired, he said, to record my full name… When he had got it, he tittered girlishly, and murmured “What a funny name!”’13 Kenneth’s introduction to headmaster Frederick Fryer, a twentysomething curate of pronounced Oxford Movement leanings, proved equally disconcerting. ‘The lowest class, or form, was in session and I was modestly lurking in the lower end of it, wondering what the deuce it was all about, when enter the Headmaster. He did not waste words. Turning to the master in charge of us, he merely said: “If that” (indicating my shrinking figure) “is not up there” (pointing to the upper strata) “by the end of the lesson, he is to be caned.” Then like a blast away he passed, and no man saw him more.
‘Here was an affair! I was young and tender, well-meaning, not used to being clubbed and assaulted; yet here I was, about to be savaged by big, beefy, hefty, hairy men, called masters! Small wonder that I dissolved into briny tears.’14
This description has the polish of a practised anecdote from which any residue of unhappiness has faded with time and repetition, a sign perhaps that the incident was an isolated one. Kenneth’s recollections do not suggest that ‘briny tears’ or fear of assault overwhelmed his schooling, although canings were constant; a friend in his twenties claimed ‘he seemed at times as if in his younger days he had been teased, and his boyish aspirations trodden on’, an outcome that, with equal probability, can be attributed to his schoolfellows, Uncle John Grahame, Mrs Inglis, or Helen and Willie.15 Unlike the bulk of his contemporaries at St Edward’s, Kenneth had neither mother nor father to miss and scant experience of the conventional childhood ‘of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the paternal smack’.16 His uprooting the previous year from The Mount was every bit as painful a severance as the transition from Cranbourne to New Inn Hall Street, and he had learned already to retreat within himself; his arrival at school was not his first experience of ‘a situation… distasteful, out of harmony, jarring’. In the case of the fictional Edward, Kenneth’s narrator glimpses on the station platform ‘the old order… at its last gasp’: Edward’s train journey is a metaphor and his initiation into the quasi-adult rites of school will terminate his childhood and the children’s easy fellowship.17 But Kenneth had made his own childhood, escaping into imagination from the triple unhappiness of his mother’s death, abandonment by his father and Mrs Inglis’s coldness. He may have recognized from the outset St Edward’s powerlessness to prevent his emotional and mental absenteeism.
The transition to school was challenging nevertheless for a boy with no father to guide, cajole or instruct him. St Edward’s was chaotic, a ‘busy world of rubs and knocks and competition’, harum-scarum in its novel unpredictability.18 The untrained undergraduates, paid as little as £15 a term to teach a narrow curriculum of ‘repetitions in Latin, Greek and Latin accidence’, took little interest in their charges, and Kenneth would later refer to ‘a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages’ and the school’s ‘lack of care or respect for abstract scholarship’.19 Physical discomfort was all-encompassing: infestations of rats; rudimentary sanitation; overcrowded dormitories with masters forced to sleep in cupboards; atrocious food; rotten woodwork that led to a floor falling in and splintering banisters; a wall that collapsed into the street. A casual brutality coloured everything, like the headmaster’s night-time games of hunting for coins in the dark: ‘Ledges in the brick wall were always a favourite hiding place, and lighted touchwood was used as a lantern. Pits were dug and filled with mud and water, and over them, and into them, the unsuspecting ones were lured.’20
Such rough and tumble was too much for Willie, whose health was delicate. In 1871 he left St Edward’s. Two years earlier, at the beginning of Kenneth’s second year, a boy had committed suicide by drowning himself in the river. These cases were exceptional. The majority of the Grahames’ schoolmates – in 1869, forty-nine boys aged between eight and eighteen – got by with stubborn endurance, while Kenneth had means of his own of withdrawing in all but body from an unpalatable present. From his own account, he emerges no more or less traumatized than his peers: he even refers to ‘those rare white [mornings] at school when it was a whole holiday, and summer was boon and young’.21 St Edward’s diet of frequent beatings did not instil in him habits of particular diligence or obedience. ‘Whatever our individual gifts, a general dogged determination to shirk and to evade kept us all at much the same dead level – a level of ignorance tempered by insubordination,’ he wrote in a story published in 1895. ‘Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime.’22 His conformity was frequently skin deep.
In place of the typical public school roster of arcane proscriptions, for which St Edward’s was too new, Kenneth’s schooling included unexpected freedoms. So long as they wore school caps, boys were permitted to wander at will about Oxford’s cobbled streets. ‘It was my chief pleasure to escape at once and foot it here and there, exploring, exploring, always exploring, in a world I had not known the like of before,’ Kenneth remembered.23 He made for ‘the stately buildings that clustered round the Radcliffe [Camera]’: the Bodleian Library, the colleges of Brasenose and All Souls, the Sheldonian Theatre, with its wrought-iron screen on to Broad Street topped by busts of the twelve Caesars so badly weathered that they resembled ‘lumps of black fungoid growth’.24 He fell in love with the Covered Market, noisy from end to end. In the company of friends he hazarded the shadowy passage of Brasenose Lane. There, according to thrilling schoolboy rumour, after the death of a disreputable drunkard the Devil himself had appeared, ‘horned and hoofed and of portentous stature’, and extracted ‘the wretched man’s soul… as a seaside tripper might extract a winkle from its shell with a pin’.25
On fine days Kenneth wandered into college gardens: no porter ever queried his right of admission. In the summer after his tenth birthday, he visited St Giles’ Fair, a freak show of giants, dwarfs, fat ladies, tattooed ladies, mermaids and ‘distorted nature of every variety’. He wandered ‘sadly down the row of booths; for my private means would not allow of a closer acquaintance with the interiors’, simultaneously absorbed and repelled by the combination of exoticism and ‘spoofery’ on offer.26 He returned to the fair regularly. In a canoe, he paddled along reaches of the river, past ‘lush meadow-grass, wet orchards, warm, insect-haunted ponds… browsing cattle… haymaking, and… farm-buildings’, as far as Osney Lock.27
In Oxford he surely first witnessed the spectacle he recorded in an essay called ‘Cheap Knowledge’. ‘In the long, dark winter evenings, outside some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest into the chilly street, I would see some lad – sometimes even a girl – book in hand, heedless of cold
and wet, of aching limbs and straining eyes, careless of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil behind them and about, their happy spirits far in an enchanted world: till the ruthless shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers.’28
To a small boy, craning his neck to gaze, the barred windows and ‘massive, bolted and enormous gates’ of Oxford’s colleges suggested ‘Houses of Correction’. Nevertheless, Kenneth was smitten at first sight, their image burned into his fancy. The principal legacy of his schooling would be an enduring romance with Oxford. His abiding memories of St Edward’s were concerned not with schoolboys’ beastliness or confraternity, but the architecture and environs of the town itself, ‘the good grey Gothic on the one hand and, on the other, the cool secluded reaches of the Thames – the “Stripling Thames”, remote and dragon-fly haunted’, where locks and lock-keepers’ gardens inspired dreams in which he ‘let the old gates swing, work[ing] the groaning winches, and hear[ing] the water lap and suck and gurgle as it slowly sinks or rises’.29 In Oxford his absorption in place became a fixed habit.
He did not forge lifelong friendships: companionship was never an urgent requirement. School holidays reunited him with Helen, Willie and Roland. In the summer he and Willie stayed with Uncle Jack Inglis in Portsmouth; they visited Uncle John Grahame in Sussex Gardens, London during the Christmas holidays. His encounters with girls were few, save Helen and Uncle John’s daughters Bessie and Agnes mostly restricted to sightings of the girls’ school that shared with St Edward’s chapel services in the nearby church of St Thomas’s. ‘Sometimes, trooping down [the road], we contrived for a brief minute to align ourselves with their more formal crocodile, and exchange with it nods… and wreathed smiles. At least we thought we did, though probably these pig-tailed young persons never ever noticed we were there. But we thought they did, and it felt like the dawn of high romance. For everything must have a beginning.’30 It is a telling recollection. Kenneth’s relationships with the opposite sex seldom advanced beyond such uncertain overtures: outside of imagination, he conceived no appetite for high romance, as his wife would discover painfully. At some point in his school career, he knotted a purse out of string, a present presumably intended for a boy’s mother. Kenneth gave his purse to Helen, who kept it for sixty years, before bestowing it on Kenneth’s widow.
Eternal Boy Page 3