Housman Country

by Peter Parker

  In the novel a successful but discontented fifty-year-old businessman called Mr Lucton leaves his home in North Bromwich (otherwise Birmingham) one beautiful summer’s evening to drive out into the countryside, with no particular purpose in mind except to escape ‘the grimy tentacles’ of his home town. Having accidentally driven his car into a deep pond, he decides to abandon it and head west on foot. Despite undergoing some alarming experiences, he finds in the countryside the kind of ‘authentic’ life denied him in the city. He helps a farming family bring in the hay, teams up with an enthusiastic Black Country member of the Ramblers’ Association, reluctantly takes part in a local cricket match, and ends up in the small village of Chapel Green as handyman to a pair of spinster sisters. The precise location of Chapel Green is not revealed, but it is in south Shropshire, and people do their shopping and consult their solicitors in nearby Ludlow.

  By an unlikely coincidence, Mr Lucton’s secretary comes from this district, and it is her mention of it in the book’s opening pages that brings Housman to her employer’s mind. Like Housman and Brett Young himself, Mr Lucton ‘had often wistfully gazed on [distant westward hills] when he was a boy’, and the first four lines of ‘In valleys of springs of rivers’ run through his mind after his secretary refers to her family home, transporting him from his oppressive office into the idyllic English landscape he knew in his youth: ‘Ah Shropshire,’ he exclaims. ‘When I was a lad, Miss Jenkins, I rode all through that part of the country on a bicycling-tour […] Nothing to beat it!’ A few pages later, he recalls the long-gone happiness he experienced when first married, and the intolerable passing of irrecoverable time since then: ‘Twenty-five years ago,’ he thinks. ‘That’s more than a third of a lifetime. And take from seventy springs three score – two and a half score to be precise – It only leaves me twenty more. Only twenty years more, after thirty of drudgery.’ It is these feelings that decide him to set off on his journey. What he needs is ‘a landscape warm and green and soothing to his nerves; and so, as he canvassed the possibilities, there came to his mind – led thither, unconsciously perhaps, by the lines of Housman he had quoted to his secretary that morning – a vision of Bredon Hill (Bredon Cloud, as the old maps called it) rising gently out of the orchard lands of the Severn Plain with the slow Avon meandering about its feet and larks overhead.’

  He heads west out of North Bromwich, ‘beyond which the line of the Clees and the dome of the Wrekin marked the ultimate skyline’, and travels through ‘the green brooklands of the Severn’ towards Housman Country: ‘It was odd, he reflected, how, all through his life, that prospect had drawn his imagination westward.’

  The novel contains frequent further allusions to Housman’s poems. Mr Lucton twice refers to hawthorn blossom as ‘tarnished’, for instance, and during his spell as a haymaker listens appreciatively to ‘the jingle of harness’ as the horses toss their heads and swish their tails. Mr Lucton has never really found a proper confidant, and so is delighted when an attractive young hiker he briefly encounters at a remote spot invites him to open his heart to her, a moment that in its setting and mood recalls ‘From far, from eve and morning’. Mr Lucton tells the young woman his life story: ‘All through this prolonged narration he was encouraged and warmed by the certainty that, for once, his emotions and motives – however small, unimportant, or even childishly ridiculous – were being acknowledged with a deeper understanding and sympathy than he had ever hoped for. From the first his heart had assured him that this would be so, yet the actuality moved him nonetheless. In that high and misty solitude a miracle had removed his loneliness.’ Tellingly, the young woman turns out to be the daughter of Lord Clun, and she tarries with Mr Lucton for no more than a breath, vanishing during the night.

  Although the Black Country rambler had not known Housman’s poetry (‘never bought a book in my life’), it is the immediate recognition of lines from A Shropshire Lad that draws Mr Lucton to one of the sisters for whom he ends up working at Chapel Green, and ‘had marked the beginning of their companionship’. When he drives the two women to Ludlow for an ominous meeting with their solicitor, he whiles away the time wandering around the town and recalls that Milton’s Comus was first performed there (in 1634). ‘It was odd how, in periods of emotion such as this, great poetry seemed to gain in intensity and even in beauty,’ he thinks.

  He walked to and fro, trying to dredge from his imperfect memory of Comus the lines he loved best, and, failing these, with better success, the poems in A Shropshire Lad that had Ludlow for a scene – pretty melancholy they were on the whole, and most of them connected with the idea of war. Fifty years had passed, he reflected, since Housman wrote them, and here we were again, thinking of war again! Danzig: New Nazi Moves … Poles Mobilize, the blood-red news-bills shrieked at him from the stationers over the way.

  At the end of the novel Mr Lucton returns to North Bromwich to take up his responsibilities once more, and the book marks the point at which escaping into the countryside is no longer an option, at which people will once again march off to war to defend the values these landscapes had come to embody, the ancient, unspoilt rural beauty now under threat from the industrialised Nazi war machine.

  When war was finally declared, propaganda posters once again drew upon that English countryside, urging ‘Your Britain – Fight For It Now’. Although Abram Games, born and raised in London’s East End, produced forward-looking images of Modernist façades behind which lay bomb-damaged urban streets, far more familiar are the posters of his assistant at the War Office, Frank Newbould. Born in Bradford and working mainly in London, Newbould nevertheless produced posters for the same series in which a shepherd and his dog drive sheep across the rolling landscape of the South Downs, a village pub and church are framed by an ancient oak, people enjoy swingboats and roundabouts on the green at Alfriston, and Salisbury Cathedral is seen not across the city’s rooftops but through lushly foliaged trees from the opposite bank of the River Nadder. Though Newbould’s images are mostly particular, they are also emblematic, a feature they share with Housman’s Shropshire.

  By this time, Housman’s poetry was available in a collected edition, edited by John Carter and published in Britain in 1939 and in America in March 1940. Although running to only 128 pages, it was issued at a standard size rather than in the ‘waistcoat pocket’ format that proved so popular when used for A Shropshire Lad in the First World War. In America, however, The Selected Poems of A.E. Housman (numbered M-1) became one of the first of the Armed Services Editions published by the Council on Books in Wartime, distributed free to American servicemen and designed specifically for battledress pockets. The format was landscape, measuring just 5½ by 3¾ inches, and the book was staple-bound in paper covers. The poems themselves were printed in double columns and arranged by published volume. This edition contained all but five of the poems that appeared in The Collected Poems, as well as Carter’s ‘Notes on the Text’ and an additional note on the author by Louis Untermeyer, reprinted from his 1920 anthology of Modern British Poetry. The poems omitted were ‘On the idle hill of summer’ and ‘The Day of Battle’ from A Shropshire Lad, ‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers’ and ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’ from Last Poems, and ‘Farewell to a name and number’ from More Poems. No acknowledgement is made of these exclusions: poems are merely renumbered, using Arabic rather than the original Roman numerals, so that ‘White in the moon the long road lies’ simply moves back a place to become no. 35 rather than no. XXXVI, which is what it should be. It was presumably felt that references to ‘dead and rotten’ soldiers, slaughtered mercenaries and combatants ‘cheap to the King’ were scarcely good for front-line morale, while the advice that it makes little difference to the inevitable fate of combatants whether they fight or run away might even be regarded as seditious.

  The odd one out among the omitted poems is ‘The chestnut casts his flambeaux, and the flowers’, which unlike the others does not have a dispiriting or alarming mil
itary theme. One can only assume that it was Housman’s reference to ‘Whatever brute or blackguard made the world’ that caused difficulties in a country where the national anthem included the words ‘And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”’ and which stamped a variation of this motto (‘In God We Trust’) on all its coins. Paul Fussell has written of anthologies issued by the Council on Books in Wartime that ‘it is unthinkable that any materials of a pacifistic, subversive, or even very skeptical tendency would find an entrance’, but Housman’s distrust of God is quite apparent in other poems. Perhaps it was the vehemence of expression that led to the omission of these few verses from the Armed Services volume. Equally, other poems that were not excluded provide a less than cheerful account of military service, so perhaps it was the particular expression of doom and dissent in the four that were dropped that caused the authorities qualms.

  Those poems that had escaped the cull came strongly recommended, reflecting the high regard in which Housman had always been held in America. ‘When he died in 1936, A.E. Housman was universally acknowledged the greatest English poet of our day,’ it was proclaimed on the book’s wrapper. Untermeyer’s note was equally certain: ‘Purely as writing, A Shropshire Lad is incomparable,’ he had written. ‘It is as a poet that Housman will live, and his verse already seems marked for permanence.’ If the American novelist Walker Percy is to be believed, some US soldiers also took Housman’s first volume with them to war. In The Moviegoer (1961) the protagonist’s father, an American from New Orleans, ‘was commissioned in the RCAF in 1940 and got himself killed before his country entered the war. And in Crete. And in the wine dark sea […] And with a copy of The Shropshire Lad in his pocket.’

  If, back in England, A Shropshire Lad was no longer in every pocket by the time war broke out, it was still being widely bought in the pocket edition, 5000 copies of which were reprinted in 1935, with two further reprints the following year, one more in 1937, two more in 1938 and another in 1940. As in the First World War, the poems served to remind soldiers of the England they had left behind them. ‘When I was posted by Coastal Command to Africa in 1942,’ recalled the novelist J.L. Carr, ‘A Shropshire Lad was one of the two books I took with me and throughout their war service his very English poems greatly consoled many thousands of servicemen sent abroad.’ (The emphasis is Carr’s.)

  Among those soldiers who knew the poems by heart and so did not need to pack the book itself was Anthony Chenevix-Trench. An outstanding classicist, he had been educated at Shrewsbury School, where he would spend his free time exploring the Shropshire Hills by bicycle and on foot, and had won a scholarship to Oxford; but his education was interrupted by the outbreak of war. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, he ended up working on the Burma railway, and although he lost one eye and suffered kidney failure he survived his experiences to become headmaster of Eton. During his wartime ordeal, his biographer records: ‘His family, his friends and his education acted as a sturdy shield as he sought solace in the serenity of his past, central to which were his literary pursuits. He summoned up his awesome powers of memory to translate all the poetry he knew into Latin and Greek. A particular occupational therapy was translating A Shropshire Lad into Latin while stonebreaking on the railway – a very Salopian thing to do, one of Tony’s friends later remarked.’ Indeed, it recalls Sabrinae Corolla, the volume Housman had been given at the age of seventeen containing English poetry translated into Latin and Greek by scholars from that school. Some of Chenevix-Trench’s translations found their way back to Shrewsbury and were published anonymously in the school’s magazine, the Salopian. The poems in question were ‘If truth in hearts that perish’, ‘When last I came to Ludlow’ and ‘Into my heart an air that kills’ (‘Ei mihi! quam flatus per pectora letifer inflat / Illic spectanti qua procul arva nitent!’). ‘Access to books he had none,’ the magazine noted, ‘and there were minor inaccuracies in the English that he had by heart, and even a slip or two in the Latin […] but it seemed more interesting to publish them practically as they reached his former Headmaster in the Schools. Not often can Latin verses have been composed in such untoward circumstances.’ This last comment was the kind of English understatement that Housman himself might have enjoyed, and Chenevix-Trench’s biography was given the title Land of Lost Content.

  One of Chenevix-Trench’s fellow prisoners of war in the Far East was a young solicitors’ clerk from Northamptonshire called Geoffrey Ipgrave. When he sailed with the Transport Corps on one of the last troopships bound for Singapore, he took the 1940 pocket edition of A Shropshire Lad with him. By the time the ship arrived in Singapore, the base had fallen to the Japanese and almost as soon as he disembarked Ipgrave became one of the 85,000 Allied troops taken prisoner there. He was sent to work on the railways in Thailand, moving from camp to camp, and remained a prisoner until the end of the war. A Shropshire Lad was the only one of his books that he refused to give up so that its pages could be used to make roll-up cigarettes, the customary fate of such volumes in POW camps. Like Salley Vickers’s father in Germany, Ipgrave was holding on to a little piece of England, a book that reminded him of the long walks he had taken with his dog in the Northamptonshire countryside, walks he also recalled in the letters he wrote home. Particular poems reminded him of particular places, not in Shropshire but in his own county, a hundred miles or so due east of Ludlow. In his copy of the book he has pencilled in his own local place-names: ‘Bulwick’ against the line ‘See how thick the goldcup flowers’; ‘Newton’ under the poem ‘March’; ‘Blatherwycke Lake’ between the first and second stanzas of ‘Oh fair enough are sky and plain’, in which Housman describes trees and clouds reflected in water. Elsewhere individual phrases, lines and verses of the poems are underlined or encircled, most of them descriptions of landscape, but he sometimes marked Housman’s references to loneliness or exhortations to stoicism. Perhaps most poignantly, against the lines ‘Here I lie down in London / And turn to rest alone’ in ‘Far in a western brookland’ he has simply written ‘THAILAND’ against ‘London’. Given the harsh and monotonous cycle of his days on the railways, it is perhaps unsurprising that he should highlight the dispiriting first stanza of ‘The Immortal Part’ (XLIII):

  When I meet the morning beam,

  Or lay me down at night to dream,

  I hear my bones within me say,

  ‘Another night, another day…’

  To counterbalance this, however, under his signature and the inscription ‘Singapore. 1942. Feb. 24th’ on the book’s flyleaf, he has written out the final stanza of ‘Twice a week the winter thorough’ (XVII), in which the Lad determines to be glad in spite of his circumstances. Ipgrave has also written out a couplet from ‘Loitering with a vacant eye’ (LI) on the leaf facing the title page, which has been marked in red with the Japanese censor’s stamp:

  Courage, lad, ’tis not for long;

  Stand, quit you like stone, be strong.

  Housman would no doubt have been delighted to learn that the Bible was the first book Ipgrave had sacrificed to roll-ups, although the wafer-thin pages proved unsuited to this use. A Shropshire Lad was evidently more effective than the scriptures in providing spiritual comfort to this prisoner far from home. In the words of his son Michael, who became Bishop of Woolwich, ‘It obviously spoke really powerfully to him as a young man at the beginning of his life going off as a soldier to a pretty bleak situation – it really spoke direct to his heart.’ The situation when Geoffrey Ipgrave arrived in Singapore was even bleaker than he could possibly have envisaged, but wherever he was sent, the increasingly battered little book – its pages torn and loose, its buckram cover worn right down to the linen so that the title and the author’s name have been wholly erased – went with him. It provided him both with a model of endurance and the means of escape from the grim circumstances of his daily life into a familiar English landscape of the imagination.

  VII

  AFTERMATHS

  So up and down I sow them

  F
or lads like me to find …

  A Shropshire Lad LXIII

  On a beautiful June day in 1951 a young army cadet called Julian Hurd took a gun from his parents’ house near Marlborough in Wiltshire, walked into a nearby wood, and shot himself dead. Finding the empty gun case, and their son’s commonplace book lying open on his desk at a page where he had written some lines from Sophocles, his parents feared the worst and went in search of him. They found him in the wood, ‘down in the most beautiful corner – stretched out with the filtering sunlight playing over him’. He was just nineteen and the family had spent the previous day driving around the local countryside, stopping from time to time to take walks and look out over the Vale of Pewsey. ‘Quite exhausted by so much loveliness J and I both slept on the way home,’ his mother had written in her diary.

  This sudden, violent death was a mystery. Julian was not much enjoying the rough and tumble of National Service, but had recently been enrolled at the Cadet School in Aldershot and had a place waiting for him at Cambridge University. He seemed, his older brother thought, ‘in good form’. Unlike that other nineteen-year-old army cadet who shot himself in 1895, there was no evidence that Julian was experiencing any romantic or sexual troubles. His mother decided that the contrast between army life and the day he had just spent soaking up the beauty of the English landscape had simply proved too much for him: ‘Julian died from what might be called an overdose of beauty after having been starved of it for so long.’