by Mike Read
A Saint
I left the tomb where pilgrims prayed
To walk upon the hills apart,
And in the blackest of the shade,
I thought of Evil in my heart.
What were the prayer and praise to me,
The shrine, and many lights therein?
One night of all eternity
I know the lonely truth of sin.
For I was tired of all the chaunting
And all the chaunting dreary grew,
And always I felt something wanting,
That my perfection never knew.
So, from the world most far apart,
In the blind darkness only I,
I thought of Evil in my heart,
Alone between the earth and sky.
There was no light; And no thing stirred.
I thought, and chuckled. Suddenly
I crouched in fear, because I heard
A sound of music near to me;
A music many players made,
Of flutes and lutes and of timbrels;
And I knew that somewhere in the shade,
God was dancing on His hills.
And all the night He leapt and trod,
To the courtly flute and mad timbrels;
God whirling and pacing, a stately God;
God’s lonely dance among the hills!
Chapter 4
The Dew-Dabblers
THE PLAN OF driving a donkey cart through Holland was forgotten as Rupert discovered Becky Falls, on the edge of Dartmoor. On 25 March, he extolled the virtues of the local topography in a letter to his cousin Erica: ‘My view from the window before me includes a lawn, flower-beds with many flowers, a waterfall, rocks and trees, forests, mountains and the sky. It covers some 20 miles of country and no houses.’
From under the shadow of Hound Tor to the south west, Becky, or Becka, Falls, tumbles and plunges some 70 feet over vast granite boulders becoming the Becca Brook, which eventually joins the River Bovey to the east of the Falls. The stamp of the Iron and Bronze Age inhabitants on the area is very marked, with burrows, cairns and hut circles littering an area rich in natural and spectacular beauty. Manaton, a derivation of Maleston – Robert de Maleston having been given the manor by Edward I – is the parish in which the Falls lie, and at the time when Rupert Brooke, Lytton Strachey and their circle came to write here, there were just 300 or so people living in the area. From late Victorian times Becky Falls farmhouse, with its 60 acres, was occupied by Mr and Mrs Hern and their son Bob, the buildings comprising a sixteenth-century stone farmhouse with three bedrooms, a cowshed, milking parlour and Beechwood cottage, a two-bedroom Victorian structure.
Lytton Strachey was already staying at the Falls at Rupert’s suggestion, when Brooke and Hugh Russell-Smith arrived, following advice that Rupert should terminate his studies of Classics and concentrate on English Literature for his fourth year at Cambridge. Strachey was working on Landmarks in French Literature. In letters to friends, descriptive passages about this part of Devon which he had just discovered flowed from Rupert’s pen, with almost the speed and majesty of the Falls themselves. To Erica he wrote:
I am leading the healthy life. I rise early, twist myself about on a kind of pulley that is supposed to make my chest immense (but doesn’t), eat no meat, wear very little, do not part my hair, take frequent cold baths, work ten hours a day and rush madly about the mountains in flannels and rainstorms for hours.
And to his close friend Dudley Ward, ‘Here it rains infinitely. But I – I dance through the rain, singing musically snatches of old Greek roundelays. Have you ever seen me in my mackintosh walking-cape dancing 17 miles in the rain?’ Jacques Raverat also received a missive:
We walked for hours a day. On one side were woods, strangely covered with green and purple by spring, and on the other great moors. The sunsets were yellow wine. And the wind! – oh! there was never such a wind to take you and shake you and roll you over and set you shouting with laughter.
The author John Galsworthy lived at Wingston Farm near Manaton for eighteen years until moving into Bury House, Sussex, in 1926. It was here he wrote The Forsyte Saga and other works, but there is no record of Brooke having visited him, although his friend David ‘Bunny’ Garnett did in 1914, just before the outbreak of war.
The Herns, the farmhouse tenants who played host to Brooke, were described by another visitor, Peggy Cornwell: ‘Mr and Mrs Hern were lovely people. Mrs Hern used to come up each morning with a tray of tea for mother and wedges of that home-made bread, spread with clotted cream for us little ones.’ The Herns’ son Bob continued to run the place until the 1950s, when it was described as a ‘large tea garden – set in surroundings of majestic beauty’.
By April 1909, Rupert was further west, at another gathering of the Apostles on the furthest tip of the Lizard, Cornwall. It was essentially a reading party, organised by G. E. Moore, who had been at Trinity with Edward Marsh and had become an Apostle in the early 1890s, at the same time as Bertrand Russell. Moore, in his early thirties at the time of this ‘coming together’ at the Lizard, was certainly a great influence on Brooke, who found the older man’s philosophies and attitude to life absorbing, and his personality infectious, despite his dislike of Fabianism. Moore was also a gifted pianist and singer. Their base, Penmenner House (‘Pen’ meaning headland and ‘menner’ standing stones) is one of Britain’s most southerly houses and was built around 1860 by Thomas Rowe. On his death in 1881, his Irish wife, Grace, lived there until her death in 1914. The eight-bedroomed dwelling that she was running at the time of Brooke’s visit afforded panoramic sea views in all directions and views of the Lizard Lighthouse, as well as access to the path across the cliffs. This idyllic setting proved to be a great attraction to writers. It is said that Oscar Wilde came here to read to the locals, but the members of G. E. Moore’s reading party offered no such public declamations, keeping their philosophies, poetry and readings within the confines of their own circle. Among the Cambridge Apostles at the gathering were the drama critic Desmond Mac-Carthy, barrister and author C. P. Sanger, author Leonard Woolf, poet and playwright R. S. ‘Bob’ Trevelyan (another leading Fabian), James Strachey, and Lytton Strachey. Strachey, some years before, had described the setting of Penmenner House in a letter to his mother as being ‘nose to nose with the sea’. Brooke described the house in a letter from there to Dudley Ward: ‘The house is 12 miles from a station and the posts are said to be irregular.’ To Jacques Raverat he enthused that he went
luggageless, and strange, and free, to The Lizard; and stayed some days. Cornwall was full of heat and tropical flowers: and all day I bathed in great creamy breakers of surf, or lay out in the sun to dry (in April!); and all night argued with a philosopher, an economist, and a writer. Ho, we put the world to rights!
The bays of Kynance and Housel were just a short stroll from the house, low tide revealing hundreds of rocky outcrops, and at Kynance a beautiful expanse of sandy beach. The extraordinarily warm weather and subsequent swimming activities brought pressure to bear on the desires of James Strachey, who had longed for an active relationship with the uninterested Brooke. James wrote to his brother, Lytton,
[F]or the first time in my life, I saw Rupert naked. Can’t we imagine what you’d say on such an occasion?. … but I’m simply inadequate of course. So I say nothing, except that I didn’t have an erection – which was fortunate as I was naked too. I thought him – if you’d like to have a pendant – ‘absolutely beautiful’.
After the brief sojourn by the Cornish sea, the peripatetic Brooke was off again, this time to the depths of the New Forest, the main attraction being the presence of the object of his desires, Noel Olivier. Although Brooke’s letters and correspondence from there are headed ‘Bank, Lyndhurst’, the hamlet in which the house Beech Shade is situated is deeper into the forest, past Bank, in a cluster of some half dozen cottages called Gritnam, at the end of a track deep in the forest. Initially discovered by leading Cambridg
e University socialist Ben Keeling, the area may have been brought to his attention through Virginia Woolf, who stayed at Lane End House in Bank during 1904 and 1905. Bank, and nearby Lyndhurst, attracted many writers during the 1880s, as well as the inspiration for one: Alice Liddell, the model for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, lived at Bank, after marrying a local man, Reginald Hargreaves. Gritnam, small as it is, is mentioned in the ‘Domesday Book’ as Greteha (the Great Homestead) – its area being ‘half a hide’, some 120 acres, and the whole being held by the romantically named Waleron Hunter.
Noel’s sister Margery had organised a Newhamite reading party at Beech Shade, which included not only Noel, but also Cambridge friends Evelyn Radford and Dorothy Osmaston. The rooms were let to them by Alice Primmer, née Hawkins, and her new husband, former army officer, Harry, who was a stud groom at Wilverly Park, Lyndhurst, at the time of the reading party, later becoming Master of the Hounds before his death in 1925. Learning that Noel would be at Bank, Rupert contrived, through Dudley Ward, who let him know the exact location, to drop in on the party as if by chance. Full of the joys of spring, he recounted his arrival in the New Forest in a letter to Jacques Raverat, liberally spiced with flights of poetic fancy:
But then, after the Lizard, oh! then came the Best! And none knows of it. For I was lost for four days. I was, for the first time in my life, a free man, and my own master! … For I went dancing and leaping through the New Forest, with £3 and a satchel full of books, talking to everyone I met, mocking and laughing at them. Sleeping and eating anywhere, singing to the birds, tumbling about in the flowers, bathing in the rivers and in general behaving naturally. And all in England, at Eastertide! And so I walked and laughed and met many people and made a thousand songs – all very good – and in the end of the days, came to a woman who was more glorious than the Sun and stronger than the Sea and kinder than the Earth, who is a flower made out of fire, a star that laughs all day, whose brain is clean and clear like a man’s, and her heart is full of courage and kindness and whom I love. I told her that the Earth was crowned with wind flowers and dancing down the violet ways of Spring; that Christ had died and Pan was risen; that her mouth was like sunlight on a gull’s wing. As a matter of fact, I believe I said ‘Hullo! Isn’t it rippin’ weather!’
Although Margery had been the instigator of the reading party, her presence did not make for an easy passage for Rupert, as a little jealousy, combined with her dual roles of guardian and older sister, meant that she watched over them. Despite that, Noel and Rupert managed walks in the woods together and some time alone, although it seems that his frustration with her ‘cheerful, clear, flat platitudes’ came through clearly at the end of The Voice’, a poem inspired by the few days at Beech Shade.
The Voice
Safe in the magic of my woods
I lay, and watched the dying light.
Faint in the pale high solitudes,
And washed with rain and veiled by night.
Silver and blue and green were showing.
And the dark woods grew darker still;
And birds were hushed; and peace was growing;
And quietness crept up the hill;
And no wind was blowing …
And I knew
That this was the hour of knowing,
And the night and the woods and you
Were one together, and I should find
Soon in the silence the hidden key
Of all that had hurt and puzzled me –
Why you were you, and the night was kind,
And the woods were part of the heart of me.
And there I waited breathlessly,
Alone; and slowly the holy three,
The three that I loved, together grew
One, in the hour of knowing,
Night, and the woods, and you -
And suddenly
There was an uproar in my woods,
The noise of a fool in mock distress,
Crashing and laughing and blindly going,
Of ignorant feet and a swishing dress,
And a Voice profaning the solitudes.
The spell was broken, the key denied me,
And at length your flat clear voice beside me
Mouthed cheerful clear flat platitudes.
You came and quacked beside me in the wood.
You said, ‘The view from here is very good!’
You said, ‘It’s nice to be alone a bit!’
And, ‘How the days are drawing out!’ you said.
You said, ‘The sunset’s pretty, isn’t it?’
By God! I wish – I wish that you were dead!
During the few days at Bank, one of the party was extremely camera-happy – presumably Dorothy Osmaston, as she does not appear in any of the many photographs taken outside Beech Shade.
‘The Voice’ was tidied up and completed at Sidmouth, where Rupert, after his few days in what he termed ‘Arcady’, at last arrived joining his parents and Aunt Fanny at the holiday hotel where they were staying. Aunt Lizzie, with whom Fanny shared Grantchester Dene in Bournemouth, had died on 9 April and this was by way of a recuperative holiday for her.
Long considered a ‘fashionable watering place’ for the wealthy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sidmouth became a health resort for the old and sickly, despite the street being deep in mud during the winter, and carts moving around to lay the dust in the summer. The roadways were made of cracked flints bonded with clay and flattened with a horse-drawn roller, the horses creating their own form of pollution which ended up on the municipal manure dump on Bedford Lawn – on a hot day, too close for comfort to the Esplanade. When Rupert came to the resort at the mouth of the River Sid in April 1909, the fishing fleet had twenty-three ‘drifters’ in which the local fisherman would drift for mackerel; on fine evenings the town turned out to watch them sail away, as Brooke may well have done from his bedroom window at Gloucester House on the Esplanade, a part of York Terrace. The following winter brought a sudden disappearance of the herring, due partly to severe weather and more industrial methods being employed; the fishing industry was never the same again in Sidmouth. During Rupert’s stay, the beach was decorated with a dancing bear, barrel organ, hurdy-gurdy, crab, cockle and nougat vendors, a penny photographer, pony rides and bathing machines.
Lines on a monument to Mary Lisle (d. 1791) in Sidmouth churchyard
Blest with soft airs from health restoring skies
Sidmouth! to thee the drooping patient flies
Ah! not unfailing is thy poet to save
To her thou gavest no refuge, but a grave!
Guard it mild Sidmouth, and revere its store
More precious, none shall ever touch thy shore
The rooms Rupert’s parents had taken were often favoured by the actor/manager and builder of His Majesty’s Theatre, Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The proprietor of Gloucester House was a Miss Couling and the Brookes’ fellow guests were a Mrs and Miss Sitzer. Rupert stayed from 13 to 20 April. Before he arrived, he wrote to Dudley Ward, ‘If I am going to join my people at Sidmouth (the bloody latest!) on Tuesday morning, pretending to have arrived from Cornwall that moment, I must be up on their last letters to me.’ The elaborate deception seems to have passed off without a hitch, his parents remaining totally oblivious to the fact that he had spent four days in the New Forest.
The visitors list in the Sidmouth Observer mentioned the Brookes staying there for several weeks, the page on which their name appeared also displaying an advertisement for the latest popular air, ‘A New National Song’ called ‘Wake Up England’.
While at Sidmouth Rupert finished a sonnet, the seeds of which had been sown during the three days at Bank. In it his feelings for Noel shine through.
Sonnet
Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the
last land! There, waiting patiently,
One day, I think, I’ll feel a cool wind blowing,
See a slow light across the Stygian tide,
And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing,
And tremble. And I shall know that you have died,
And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream,
Pass, light as ever, through the listless host,
Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam –
Most individual and bewildering ghost! –
And turn and toss your brown delightful head
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead.
Brooke wrote from Sidmouth to fellow King’s man Geoffrey Fry, who would later be knighted for his work in the Civil Service, ‘yet ‘England, My England’ (Henley) is to use an old-fashioned word, nice’ and, ‘there is a grey sea like this … and a grey sky like this … and I have just read Cymbeline’. On 15 April he wrote to Eddie Marsh, ‘Returning on reluctant and bare feet from a long period of fantastic roaming, to the bosom of my sad family in their present seaside resort, I have found documents from King’s that passionately demand my presence earlier than I had thought.’ The following day he wrote to Hugh Dalton:
You will wonder why Simple Life ends in a Seaside Resort and lined paper. It looks a little like Second Childhood, doesn’t it? I think it is merely the first, revenant, but it is all too difficult to explain. I play a great deal on the beach. On reluctant and naked feet I turned from the violet wilderness to the sad breast of my family in their present seaside resort. For the first time in three weeks I wear a tie; almost a collar. This is a bloody place. And in this house Mr Joseph Hocking was staying a week ago; and, last year, Mr Beerbohm Tree and family! I move, as ever, you see, among the tinsel stars.