by Peter Parker
Far in a western brookland
1859–1876
Housman may have struck his later friends and colleagues as a solitary man, but it was not always so. His childhood was spent as part of a large family of seven children, and until their mother fell ill they appear to have had a happy and carefree time at Perry Hall. In 1818 J.N. Brewer’s The Beauties of England and Wales described Bromsgrove as a ‘large, but dirty place, full of shops and of manufacturers of nails, needles, and some sheeting and coarse linen’. By Housman’s time, however, Bromsgrove was a reasonably thriving Worcestershire town. Hiring fairs were held in the open-air marketplace just around the corner from Perry Hall; men waited patiently to find work, their prospective employers sometimes in competition with recruiting sergeants who urged the men to join the army instead. Housman would draw upon his memories of both activities when writing A Shropshire Lad. He walked past the market every day on his way to the nearby King Edward’s School, which he had entered in September 1870. He was a Foundation Scholar, as all the Housman boys would be (at one point bagging five of the twelve scholarships available), in a school where ‘all clever boys had to be classics’. This suited young Alfred very well since his interest in the ancient world had already been stimulated by J.E. Bode’s Ballads from Herodotus (1853), consisting of verse translations of the Greek author, and Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary (1788), which, as he later put it, ‘fell into my hands when I was eight [and] attached my affections to paganism’.
The garden at Perry Hall was almost two acres and largely screened from the house, providing the children with somewhere to pursue their interests free from adult supervision. It had three discrete areas: the ornamental garden, the kitchen garden, and a more or less abandoned area with some old fruit trees in it. Over the years seven chestnut trees had been planted, commemorating the birth of each of Edward and Sarah Jane’s children. The garden also contained, running alongside the lawn, the distinctly romantic remnants of the seventeenth-century house that had originally occupied the site: a stretch of red-brick wall with stone-mullioned windows, evoking a former time and other lives now vanished. This house had been replaced by a handsome building with tall Gothic windows, built in 1824 by Housman’s paternal great-uncle. Its imposing façade, thickly clad in ivy, gave Perry Hall a four-square appearance, but a range of offices, where Edward none too energetically conducted his solicitor’s business, was tacked onto one side. A solid, studded door opened onto a well-lit stone-flagged hall from which a large staircase rose to the floors above. This was in contrast to the back stairs; these served the domestic quarters and were ‘dark, twisted and steep, with no window but an opaque square, which drew up a glimmer of light from the kitchen below’. Laurence nevertheless described the house as ‘friendly’, as indeed it must have seemed, packed as it was with a family of nine, a governess, a nanny and a small retinue of servants.
‘Was there ever such an interesting family as we were?’ Housman once asked Laurence. ‘There were probably many,’ Laurence thought; ‘but none, I daresay, more interested in itself, when it stood compact and pugnaciously united – seven against the rest of the world. How we loved; how we hated; how we fought, divided, and were reconciled again! How we trained, and educated ourselves; and developed a taste in literature and in the writing of it, in which, until years later, our elders had no part, and with which school-hours had little to do.’ As befitted the eldest of the children, Alfred was the undisputed leader, both writing and directing the plays they staged for their parents, and organising literary competitions and other word-games. Some of these games were educational, and Laurence provides an enchanting image of the children, under Alfred’s instructions, forming a living orrery on the lawn:
I was the sun, my brother Basil the earth, Alfred was the moon. My part in the game was to stay where I was and rotate on my own axis; Basil’s was to go round me in a wide circle rotating as he went; Alfred, performing the movements of the moon, skipped round him without rotation. And that is how I learned, and have ever since remembered, the primary relations of the sun, the earth, and the moon.
This childhood interest in astronomy eventually led to Housman’s principal work as a classical scholar, his edition of Manilius’s Astronomica. In the Introductory Lecture he delivered at University College, London, in 1892 he would describe astronomy as ‘a science which has not only fascinated the profoundest intellects but has also laid a strong hold on the popular imagination’, and – perhaps because he lost his religious faith – stars, planets and constellations would also figure in his poetry in astrological aspects derived from the Classics, shaping the fate of men.
Housman had been brought up a devout Christian. Both his parents were the children of clergymen and the household was a conventionally religious one, summoned to the dining room every morning for family prayers before breakfast. The bells of the church of St John the Baptist, which with its tall steeple rose opposite and above Perry Hall on a small but commanding hill, called the family to morning and evening service every Sunday. It was merely a matter of crossing the road – easier and safer then than now – and climbing a broad flight of steps onto the path that leads through a churchyard ringed with lime trees to the west door. Other bells pealed or tolled throughout the week, marking marriages, baptisms, funerals and events in the church calendar, while the passing hours were marked by the striking of the church clock. The frequent sense in Housman’s poetry of the ephemeral nature of life may well have been instilled during a childhood in which life’s climacterics and the relentless onward movement of time were regularly and audibly measured out.
It became apparent just how precarious life could be when in 1870 the children’s mother fell ill and withdrew from everyday family life to her bedroom. The stability of the Housman family was also being undermined by financial troubles. Perry Hall did not belong to Edward Housman – he was merely a life tenant – but he had nevertheless decided to furnish it in the style he felt appropriate for an English gentleman. In order to do so, he had mortgaged other properties without telling anyone what he was up to. The death of his father early in 1870 and anxiety about money and his wife’s health made Edward turn to drink. When alcohol ran out, he would go to the bottom of the garden and throw stones onto the roof of the neighbouring Shoulder of Mutton pub in order to summon fresh supplies.
In the later stages of her illness, Sarah Jane had asked Alfred to pray with her for her recovery. It was presumably this that prompted her to express to her husband the hope that her dying would not cause her eldest son to lose his faith, a wish Edward passed on to Alfred in the letter telling him of her death. Housman did not immediately do so, but within the year had become a Deist, still believing in a Creator but not in one who intervened in human affairs, and he eventually rejected Christianity altogether. His sister Kate recalled that their mother’s death ‘roused within him an early resentment against nature’s relentless ways of destruction’, although the children never discussed their loss among themselves. ‘Death – that cuts short both joys and sorrows – became an obsession with him, very evident in after life, but there in boyhood,’ Kate wrote. Indeed death was the first subject Housman set for his siblings when he started organising the composition of jointly authored poems.
When Sarah Jane died, it was decided that Housman should not return home for the funeral but continue to stay with his godmother Elizabeth Wise at Woodchester. Elizabeth was a long-standing friend of Housman’s mother (whose father had been rector at Woodchester), and young Alfred became particularly close both to her elder daughter, Edith, who was some five years older than him, and the family’s German governess, Sophie Becker, who would remain a lifelong friend. By the time Alfred returned to Perry Hall, his grieving father had begun drinking even more heavily. An opportunity for Edward to escape everyday reminders of his loss arose in February 1872 when the tenant of the Housman family home, Fockbury House, died. This house belonged jointly to Edward (who had been born there) and his fiv
e surviving siblings, all of whom derived income from it being rented out; but Edward was the chief trustee and decided that, rather than finding another tenant, he would move there with his children and let Perry Hall instead. This may have been financially ill-advised, but for the children it offered new excitements of life in the countryside rather than on the edge of a town.
Fockbury House itself, which was just along the road from where Housman had been born, dated back to the seventeenth century, but it had been enlarged and altered over the years, its original half-timbering now a mere remnant among numerous brickwork additions. There had once been a large clock in one of its many gables, and locals still referred to it as ‘the Clockus’ or Clock House. The property included a large terraced garden and some old farm buildings, but had few of the modern amenities of Perry Hall: there was no gas, no running water, and not as many servants. It was to this house that in July 1873 Edward Housman brought his new bride. Lucy Housman was Edward’s first cousin. She had also been Sarah Jane’s best friend and had introduced Housman’s parents, afterwards acting as bridesmaid at their wedding. At fifty, she was eight years Edward’s senior and while he no doubt valued her as someone to relieve a widower’s loneliness, another very good reason for marrying her was that she was capable of taking on seven children ranging in age from fourteen to just four years old. Lucy turned out to be far more than merely capable, and almost immediately won the genuine affection of the large brood she had inherited. Housman was soon addressing letters to ‘My dear Mamma’, and signing himself ‘your loving son’.
‘Country influences worked strongly in making A.E.H. the man he became,’ Kate recorded, and it was at Fockbury that Housman’s love of the English countryside was nurtured. It was strengthened by regular visits to Woodchester and his discovery in the attic of his new home of a seventeenth-century herbarium assembled by some ancestors who had lived there. This book taught him about the names and families of plants, leading him in time to become a knowledgeable amateur botanist. Making his way daily to school through the narrow lanes down into Bromsgrove, he could observe native plants, their habitats and flowering seasons. ‘Spring Flowers’ was another subject Kate remembered her brother setting for family poetry-writing sessions, and many of his own mature poems refer to landscapes, the trees and plants that grow in them, and the changes they undergo as the seasons turn.
Kate described the ‘very pretty streams of this brook-girt land’, and this, rather than anywhere in Shropshire, is the ‘western brookland / That bred me long ago’ recalled by Housman in one of the best-known poems in A Shropshire Lad (LII). More immediately, probably in 1875, Housman wrote a poem titled ‘Summer’. Housman is always associated with the cherry because of the popular poem in which he calls it ‘Loveliest of trees’, but his favourite tree as a boy was the beech. ‘Many years later he told me he was glad he had not been brought up in beech-wood country,’ Laurence recalled, ‘for, had he been, its beauty would have made him unappreciative of any other kind.’ He was nevertheless familiar with beeches because there were several in the garden of Fockbury House, while at Woodchester, he remembered in 1927, ‘there used to be a belt of beeches half way up the hill, dividing the downs from the fields and making a piece of scenery which in its way was as beautiful as anything anywhere’. It seems almost inevitable, this being Housman, that he should add: ‘and now the greater part of them are down and the whole look of the place changed’. In a different way ‘Summer’ too embodies the sense of passing time and the inevitability of death that Kate thought characteristic of her brother as a boy: the wind whispers of ‘coming Autumn, coming death’. Changing seasons and falling leaves are of course a poetic commonplace, but the mood was one that Housman would make particularly his own. And here it is in a poem he wrote as an adolescent.
Summer! and after Summer what?
Ah! happy trees that know it not,
Would that with us it might be so.
And yet the broad-flung beechtree heaves
Through all its slanting layers of leaves
With something like a sigh.
The continuity between this piece of juvenilia and the work of the mature poet is suggested by the repeated use of the unusual verb (perhaps borrowed from Gray’s Elegy) to describe the effect of wind blowing through heavily leafed trees in one of his best loved poems:
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves …
One of Housman’s first experiences of longing for a distant home, a principal theme of A Shropshire Lad, occurred when, after an outbreak of scarlet fever in the family, he briefly became a boarder at King Edward’s School in order to avoid catching the disease. He wrote to his stepmother:
Yesterday I went into the Churchyard, from which one can see Fockbury quite plainly, especially the window of your room. I was there from 2 o’clock till 3. I wonder if you went into your room between those hours. One can see quite plainly the pine tree, the sycamore & the elm at the top of the field. The house looks much nearer than one would expect, & the distance between the sycamore & the beeches in the orchard seems great, much longer than one thinks when one is at Fockbury.
As Laurence noted, this episode ‘has in it the authentic note of the “Shropshire Lad”. Even as a boy, separation from home surroundings affected him so much that it pleased him to spend from two to three hours of a winter’s afternoon in viewing them from a distance.’ Housman’s enduring love of trees, most particularly before they shed their leaves, was expressed in a quatrain which he wrote at the same time as the poems of A Shropshire Lad and seems to recall the felling of the beeches at Woodchester:
Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land.
While exploring their new rural environment, the Housman children frequently visited the homes of local working-class people. These visits were not of a charitable nature, as those of their parents might have been, but entirely and unaffectedly social. It was a curiosity of the English class system that, in rural areas at any rate, the strict divisions that separated adults did not apply to children. Though it would be unthinkable for middle-class parents to mix socially with cottagers and labourers, it was not unusual for their children to spend time in the homes of working-class families, where, more often than not, they were welcomed. Such visits could prove educational as children learned of other worlds and different standards, of hardships but also sometimes of freedom from the sort of constraints that regulated their own lives. ‘The depth of feeling of simple villagers and farmhands used sometimes to surprise me,’ Laurence recalled, and it seems likely Housman was similarly enlightened. ‘Now and then things were told us by our village neighbours of which I have since made literary use,’ Laurence continued, and the poems of A Shropshire Lad reimagine the experiences of agricultural labourers such as those the Housman children met around Fockbury.
More specifically, Fockbury supplied the ‘western horizon’ that would haunt Housman as an adult and remind him of ‘the happy highways where [he] went’ during his childhood (XL). It was a horizon he could see, and which can still be seen, from Broom Hill, a modest knoll the Housman children nicknamed ‘Mount Pisgah’. Broom Hill was a short walk from Fockbury House, at the top of the wonderfully named Worms Ash Lane, and Housman and his siblings often climbed it to look out across the Severn Plain to the distant hills beyond. The original Mount Pisgah was what Moses was directed to climb in order to see the Promised Land but, in a twist characteristic of Housman, the Worcestershire Mount Pisgah became in his mind the vantage point from which he looked not on a land full of promise but one saturated in ‘lost content’. The view not only extended to the distant Clee Hills of Shropshire, but also took in Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, the location of one of his most famous poems. Mount Pisgah was where the Housman family would go on 22 June 1887 to see the beacons lit for Queen Victori
a’s Golden Jubilee, a national event commemorated in the very first poem of A Shropshire Lad.
At school, meanwhile, Housman was distinguishing himself as a fine classical scholar and the frequent recipient of prizes, winning everything from Mr Case’s Prize for Holiday Task and the Government Prize for Freehand Drawing to prizes for English, Greek and Latin poetry. He was not merely good at Classics, but had an interest in the whole of the ancient world. On a visit to the British Museum during a trip to London in 1875, he would report that he ‘spent most of [his] time among the Greeks & Romans’. At fifteen, his classical tastes were already formed: he ‘did not admire’ the Townley Venus, a Roman statue of the goddess naked to the waist, far preferring what he called ‘the Farnese Mercury’ (more commonly known as the Farnese Hermes), a naked youth sporting little more than a pair of winged sandals. It is altogether characteristic of the young classical scholar that he should ascribe the Roman name of the god to a Roman statue – even if it was the copy of a Greek one – and it is Mercury who would be ‘The Merry Guide’ in the poem of that name included in A Shropshire Lad (XLII). That Christmas, Housman was presented with Charicles; or Illustrations of the Private Life of Ancient Greece (a volume that promises rather more than it delivers) as an examination prize for Latin and Greek Grammar, and the following year he received William Smith’s recently published Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities as the Classical Prize.