So back to Islip; much to the disappointment of my parents, who hoped that I had at last seen reason and settled down in a position which equally suited my needs and my talents; and to the undisguised relief of my sister-in-law.
The remainder of this story, from 1926 until today, is dramatic but unpublishable. Health and money both improved, marriage wore thin. New characters appeared on the stage. Nancy and I said unforgivable things to each other. We parted on May 6th, 1929. She, of course, insisted on keeping the children. So I went abroad, resolved never to make England my home again; which explains the ‘Goodbye to All That’ of this title.
1.Robert Graves in Majorca
2.Robert Graves, from a portrait by Eric Kennington
3a. Charterhouse School in 1914
3b. Béthune before the shelling, 1915.
4a. The brickstacks at Cuinchy
4b. Somme Battle. First Royal Welch Fusiliers attacking near Mametz, 1 July 1916.
5. Somme trench map: Martinpuich section
6a. Waterlogged mine crater
6b. Somme Battle. Scene in a communication trench before an attack
7a. Royal Welch Fusiliers at rest, 28 June 1916
7b. Mametz village, July 1916
8. The Second Royal Welch Fusilier Goat and Band at the 33rd Division Horse Show, July 1917
EPILOGUE
THOUGH often asked to publish a continuation of this autobiography, which I wrote in 1929 at the age of thirty-three, I am always glad to report that little of outstanding autobiographical interest has happened since. The proofs of Goodbye to All That reached me in Majorca, where I had gone to live as soon as I finished the writing, and which is still my home.
The one serious set-back to my quiet life here came with the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when all British subjects were advised to leave, by warship. I wandered around Europe and the United States for three years; and spent the Second World War in England, because three of my children had joined the Armed Forces – the fourth, Sam, being prevented by deafness from doing the same.
Jenny became a W.A.A.F. war-correspondent, entering Paris with General Le Clerc’s tanks, and Brussels with General Adair’s; and nearly getting killed at Arnhem. Catherine, a W.A.A.F. radio-operator, married Squadron-Leader Clifford Dalton, now Engineer-in-Chief to the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. David joined the First Royal Welch, who had lost very heavily during the defence of Calais, assisted at their famous reunion with the Second Battalion in Madagascar, and then went on with them to India and Burma. He was killed on the Arakan peninsula in March 1943, after going up with a sergeant and one man to bomb the Japanese out of three strong-points, which had held up the battalion’s advance. They captured the first strong-point, and when his companions were wounded, David rushed the second single-handed; but was shot through the head trying to take the third. The War Office turned down his recommendation for a posthumous Victoria Cross on the ground that the attack had failed – an Indian battalion retired, the Japanese infiltrated, and what remained of the Royal Welch were forced to cut their way back.
I volunteered for infantry service as soon as war broke out, but when informed that His Majesty could not employ me except in a sedentary appointment, I returned to work – on a book about Sergeant Roger Lamb, who fought with the First Battalion in the American War of 1776–83; and on another about John Milton’s behaviour in the English Civil Wars. To avoid getting bombed unnecessarily, I settled in South Devon. Half-way through the war, someone invited me to join the special constabulary, but our village policeman declined to forward my application. His reasons, as I found out by discreet inquiry, were that my German second name made him suspicious; that I had been heard talking a foreign language to two disreputable foreigners – Spanish refugee friends, as it happened, one a major, the other a staff-colonel; and that the words HEIL HITLER! had been found scratched on a vegetable marrow in my garden. So I continued merely as an Air Raid Warden, but took a stern line a few days later when my age-group got called up for medical examination and the policeman brought me a third-class railway-warrant, together with an order to appear before a medical board at Exeter. As an officer on the pensioned list, I refused to travel except first class, a privilege to which my rank entitled me – he and I might find ourselves in the same compartment, and it would never do for us two to mix socially. So far as I was concerned, the Red Lamp (to put it that way) still burned red, and the Blue Lamp still true blue.
Nancy and I eventually got divorced. I married again, have had four more children, enjoy good health, travel as little as possible, and continue to write books. What else can I say, unless that my best friend is still the waste-paper basket?
Though Charterhouse certainly has a very good name nowadays, and is even suggested as a worthy school for Prince Charles to attend, I do not send my boys there; on principle. The other day, however, I met ‘Uncle Ralph’ Vaughan-Williams, O.M., for the first time since 1912, and as we talked fondly of Max Beerbohm (who had been in the same form as Uncle Ralph at Charterhouse) we suddenly found ourselves singing the Carmen Carthusianum in unison, to the surprise of a crowded Palma restaurant. I felt a little surprised, too. And it certainly is strange to think that the best British caricaturist and essayist, and the best musician of my day, have also been products of that most Philistine school.
Goodbye to All That reads as ripe ancient history now, and I have so far passed the age when policemen begin to seem very young, that police-inspectors, generals, and admirals do the same. Many of the familiar names that swim up from the past have acquired novel senses. For instance, mischievous young Corporal Mike Pearson, whom I recommended for a commission from the Oxford Cadet Battalion in 1917, has become Mr Lester Pearson, Canada’s most famous citizen. And, by the way, Malcolm Muggeridge, until recently editor of Punch, who succeeded me at Cairo University, tells me that Colonel Nasser was one of my pupils there. I should not be surprised.
Rural Majorca, too, with its five very moderate hotels, is now billed as Europe’s most favourite holiday place: it boasts of ninety tourist planes flying in daily throughout the summer and a new first-class hotel completed every week. I can’t pretend that I am pleased; and my children, the youngest of whom is four years old, look oddly at me when I tell them that I was born in the reign of Prince Charles’s great-great-great-grandmother, before aeroplanes flew, when it was wicked for women to wear trousers or use lipstick, when practically nobody had electric light, and when a man with a red flag was required by law to walk in front of every motor-car. Yet I do not seem to have changed much, mentally or physically, since I came to live here, though I can no longer read a newspaper without glasses, or run upstairs three steps at a time, and have to watch my weight. And if condemned to relive those lost years I should probably behave again in very much the same way; a conditioning in the Protestant morality of the English governing classes, though qualified by mixed blood, a rebellious nature, and an overriding poetic obsession, is not easily outgrown.
* He won the bet.
* The gas-cylinders had by this time been put into position on the front line. A special order came round imposing severe penalties on anyone who used any word but ‘accessory’ in speaking of the gas. This was to keep it secret, but the French civilians knew all about the scheme long before this.
* According to the newspapers, a vision of angels had been seen by the British Army at Mons; but it was not vouchsafed to Sergeant Townsend, who was there, with most of ‘A’ Company.
* Major Swainson recovered, and was back at the Middlesex Depôt after a few weeks. On the other band, Lawrie, a Royal Welch quartermaster-sergeant back at Cambrin, was hit in the neck that day by a spent machine-gun bullet which just pierced the skin, and thed of shock a few hours later.
* He was recommended for a Victoria Cross, but got nothing because no officer evidence, which is a condition of award, was available.
* The fortunes made in the War were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when peasants in th
e devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims for the loss of possessions they never had.
* ‘O, if the powerful cleric who fulminates with his mouth…’
* I cannot explain the discrepancy between his dating of my death and that of the published casualty list.
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