by Mike Read
Other ‘tinsel stars’ associated with Sidmouth included Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived there with her family from 1832 in Fortfield Terrace and Cedar Shade (then called Belle Vue), before moving to Wimpole Street in London in 1835. Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray were two other eminent authors with strong Sidmouth connections. Gloucester House where the Brookes stayed is still as much as it was, only no longer bearing the name, and now incorporated into the Royal York and Faulkener Hotel, which began as the York, the first purpose-built hotel in Sidmouth – the ‘Royal’ prefix emanating from Edward VII’s presence there when he was still Prince of Wales.
Having received a welcome financial prize from the Westminster Gazette for his poem ‘The Voice’, Rupert headed back to Cambridge via London, staying at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn, with Eddie Marsh. By now Marsh was becoming an increasing influence in artistic circles, as well as in London’s social and political arena, into which he was beginning to introduce Rupert.
In the ancient manor of Portpoole, Old Gray’s Inn was bounded to the south by Holeburn Street, the Roman road which entered the City of London at New Gate, while to the east lay the town residence of Bishopric, later known as Ely Palace. To the north open fields stretched to Highgate, and to the west there was more country landscape, known as Jockey Fields. Raymond Buildings, on the west side of Gray’s Inn, were built in the early 1800s on part of the gardens formerly known as the black walks, the southerly end of the impressive six-storey terrace rising on Bacon’s Mount, where Francis Bacon had once constructed a 30-foot-high mound topped by a summerhouse. As others, including Brooke, would come to also, Bacon the philosopher loved the tranquillity of the walks; he wrote of them in his essay on gardens, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden and indeed it is the “Pursuit of Human Pleasure”.’ The buildings were named after Sir Robert Raymond, as they were originally to be erected in 1725 when he was Chief Justice, although fate decreed they were not to grace the site until, as it proclaims over the door of number five, 1825, when George IV was halfway through his ten-year reign.
Brooke had become the pin-up of Cambridge and Marsh, like others, was captivated by the Old Rugbeian’s looks and charisma. He kept a close watch on the young poet, inviting him to stay whenever he liked at 5 Raymond Buildings, which he did frequently as Rupert’s gravitational pull towards London became stronger; so adding to the already colourful history of the area. But however much the literary and social activities lured him to the capital, they would never surpass his love of the English countryside.
Three years later, in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, Brooke would write, ‘At Over they fling oaths at one’, but in May 1909 the locals may have had good reason to fling oaths, when Rupert and a crowd of Cambridge friends packed into Justin Brooke’s German Opel motor car – surely a terrifying sight in any sleepy hamlet at that time – and nearly crashed the car there on the way to Overcote.
For centuries, Over depended on the River Ouse and the Fens for its existence, in Norman times the river being full of fish and wild fowl plentiful in the area (although now the closest point to the River Ouse, which at one time flowed much nearer to the actual village, is at Overcote, 2 miles over the fields). Catches were dispatched daily to many cities, including London. In 1630 the Earl of Bedford appointed the Dutch engineer Vermuyden to drain the Fens, causing angry locals who feared for their livelihood to wreck the dykes as fast as they were being built. Despite this opposition, 21-mile-long canals, known as the Old and New Bedford Rivers, were successfully constructed, as well as red-back houses in the Dutch style being erected in Over. Woad, the blue dye with which the ancient Britons daubed themselves, was grown extensively around Over in the tenth century, which brought the cloth trade to the area. Architecture of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is still in evidence there.
On 2 May, the near-accident avoided, the Opel, with Justin Brooke at the wheel, Rupert, Geoffrey Keynes, Gwen and Margaret Darwin from Newnham Grange, and Ka Cox and Dorothy Lamb from Newnham College, rumbled down the track from Over to Overcote, where there was nothing more than a ferry and a small inn on the other side of the river. They laid out their breakfast at the edge of a meadow, where a crab apple was in bloom and a nightingale sang – an idyllic scene, despite only a watery sun and damp grass, inspiring Rupert to read aloud from Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Corinna’s Going a-Maying’:
Come let us goe, while we are in our prime
And take the harmlesse and follie of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short: and our dayes run
As fast away as does the summer.
Through such early-morning escapades, at Cambridge they swiftly earned themselves the nickname of ‘dew-dabblers’, running barefoot through the grass at dawn, and making wreaths of apple blossom and chains of cowslips and daisies. The ‘dew-dabbling’ was so successful that it was repeated later that month, the party this time including Rupert, Justin Brooke, Keynes, Trinity scholar Jerry Pinsent, Dudley Ward, Donald Robertson and three women thought to be the Darwins – Margaret, Frances and Gwen – although forty-three years on, Donald Robertson, who was photographed wrestling with Rupert at the gathering, and Dudley Ward could not agree on their identity when writing to Geoffrey Keynes in 1952. He thought the women could have included Dorothy Osmaston and Evelyn Radford, confessing ‘the kneeling man defeats us all’.
Chapter 5
First of May 1933
BEFORE SITTING FOR his Tripos in May, Rupert’s thoughts turned to taking rooms out of King’s, a few miles upstream, at Grantchester. The village was a key locality in pre-Roman times, as the River Granta could be forded there, the Fens circumvented and the dense forest leading south-west to the Chilterns avoided. In Roman times the Icknield Way, Ermine Street and Akeman Street all passed close enough to Cambridge to make the crossing of the Granta a position of importance. Grantabrycge is mentioned in a chronicle of 875 AD and is on the site of an early Roman settlement. The small cluster of houses had been known by at least twenty-four names or variants of spelling by the time it acquired its present name during the fourteenth century. A. C. Benson, a friend of Brooke’s and student at Magdalene College, wrote of the village in an article ‘Along the Road’ for the church family newspaper:
There is a little village near Cambridge called Grantchester, with an old church and pleasant homely houses among orchards and gardens. The hamlet dips down to the river by Trumpington Mill – the scene of one of Chaucer’s tales which solidly and sturdily bestrides the Leat, that flows from the upper waters of the Cam, here called the Granta. It is a place of perfect English charm. The long high-towering woods of Trumpington Hall fringe the stream and the water-meadows and the pool where Byron used to bathe; the great clear mill-pool swirls and eddies below the mill.
Brooke’s intimacy with the Granta was such that he became adept at paddling in a small boat the 3 miles from Cambridge to Grantchester, even on a moonless night and through overgrown stretches of the river. One of his friends Sybil Pye recalled how ‘he would know, he said, when we were nearing home by the sound of a certain poplar tree that grew there: its leaves rustled faintly even on such a night as this, when not a breath seemed to be stirring.’ He had walked there on several occasions and taken tea at the Orchard. First planted in 1868, the Orchard became a popular place for taking tea purely by chance in 1897, after a Cambridge student, having punted up the Granta from the area behind the colleges known as ‘the backs’, asked Mrs Stevenson of Orchard House if she could possibly serve him and some fellow students tea, beneath the apple trees. She assented, and the students, so enjoying the experience, spread the word; and their enthusiasm turned it into a popular ‘up-river resort’ for all the colleges. The late-Victorian students of 1897 weren’t the first to grace the area. For over 700 years Cambridge scholars had ventured to Grantchester by boat, foot, or horse, including such emi
nent names as Cromwell, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Newton, Darwin, Marlowe and Spenser. A frequent visitor to the Orchard was the philosopher, mathematician and essayist Bertrand Russell who, for ten years, lived two doors away, the other side of the Old Vicarage, at the Mill House; his Austrian pupil, the suicidal Ludwig Wittgenstein, was often to be seen working off his excess mental energy by running along the banks of the river. Rupert idly wondered whether there was a possibility of taking rooms in Grantchester.
In cavalier fashion he wrote to Noel Olivier:
At eleven o’clock in the morning I finished the last of my Classical Tripos. There were 108 other candidates in the room, but they all stayed the full time, till noon. They write longer, better papers than mine. (They all wear spectacles) … I screamed with laughter, suddenly; and the 108 turned round and blinked. I nodded at the hairless don who was in command, amd ran cheerily out of the room, tearing the examination paper to bits as I went.
No sooner was the exam over than his romantic side sprang into action. ‘Oh lo! The south! The lakes of Surrey! They call me! And I shall possibly see Noel in the distance! … And then to have to pack a bag! And even that is a ritual of infinite joy and calm splendour.’
His destination was again the Cotterills’ house at Godalming, although Noel and Bedales was his real goal. His infatuation with Noel continued unabated, while she exercised a natural caution and independence. She maintained a distance that continually fuelled his verbal passions and outpourings. He wrote to Noel at Bedales on 28 May 1909:
Why should I do more than observe you in a distant crowd? Why, rather, come to Bedales at all? … I want to see you; and, as things are at present, I shall come over to Bedales, under the high protection of an OB [Old Bedalian], wander about, talk with Badley [the headmaster], and, ultimately, find out if I am allowed to talk to you. You can, and may, evade or stop me. (Surely we have got beyond the last insult of politeness?)
Noel responded on 1 June, ‘I too always have the fear of you – the outsider – looking a fool and my feeling one; but as the last depends on the first, and the first depends on you, I am willing to risk owning your acquaintance, if you like?’ Her postscript adds, ‘She wishes you weren’t coming; but she daren’t say so outright, for fear of offending your pride!’
Writing from Coombe Field, Godalming, Rupert responded furiously on 2 June:
You’re a devil! Beginning by assigning a time, going on to water it down . . and ending with a postscript in the third person, but referring, as far as the meagre wit classics have left me can discover, to you, and changing the whole thing, and leaving me cr-r-rushed!
He wrote as an adolescent lovesick schoolboy, although nearly twenty-two, while Noel, at seventeen, responded with measured adult caution, sometimes her tone being incredibly brusque, as at the end of a letter written to Rupert from Bedales: ‘I’m sorry – I’m in a very bad rage because I’ve been doing easy exams badly – a thing you never did, so you can’t sympathise. Don’t try … from Noel.’
In among the angst there was light relief. The King’s magazine Basileon carried Gerald Shove’s tongue-in-cheek freshers’ guide to the college clubs and societies, including the Carbonari.
THE CARBONARI
Objects: The production of minor poets and strong silent politicians.
Subscriptions: All payments are made in kind – verse and epigrams preferred.
Qualifications: Culture: long hair; old pumps (or carpet-slippers).
The magazine also sent up the first Carbonari Ball, claiming that various unlikely performances would occur during the evening, culminating with the news that ‘Mr RUPERT BROOKE will perform a dream-dance on tiptoe’. The organ also carried two of Brooke’s poems, ‘Day and Night’ and ‘Sonnet’.
Sonnet
All night the ways of Heaven were desolate,
Long roads across a gleaming empty sky.
Outcast and doomed and driven, you and I,
Alone, serene beyond all love or hate.
Terror or triumph, were content to wait,
We, silent and all-knowing. Suddenly
Swept through the heavens, low-crouching from on high,
One horseman, downward to the earth’s low gate!
Oh! perfect from the ultimate height of living,
Lightly we turned, through wet woods blossom-hung,
Into the open. Down the supernal roads,
With plumes a-tossing, purple flags far-flung,
Rank upon rank, unbridled, unforgiving,
Thundered the black battalions of the Gods.
During the summer of 1909, socialising, poetry and the Fabian Society were making such an increasing demand on Brooke’s time that his tutor suggested that he should not only give up Classics to concentrate on English Literature during his fourth year, but also move out of King’s – preferably out of town altogether, away from the temptations of the social scene. So by June, Rupert had fulfilled at least one desire – to take rooms at the Orchard in Grantchester.
Having settled in to his new home, Rupert wrote from there to Noel:
I am in the country in Arcadia; a rustic. It is a village 2 miles from Cambridge, up the river. You know the place; it is near all picnicking grounds. And here I work at Shakespeare and see very few people … I wander about barefoot and almost naked, surveying nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand nature, but I get on very well with her in a neighbourly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together … I live on honey, eggs and milk, prepared for me by an old lady like an apple (especially in face) and sit all day in a rose garden to work. Of a morning Dudley Ward and a shifting crowd come out from Cambridge and bathe with me, have breakfast (out in the garden, as all meals) and depart.
Noel dealt Brooke a curt, sarcastic, down-to-earth response to this latest epistle, which was adorned with exaggerations about his surroundings and lifestyle:
I don’t quite see how it is you can enjoy breakfast – and all meals – but especially breakfast in a rose garden in this sort of weather, I should think the butter would be too hard and frozen and the coffee – I beg your pardon, of course you don’t drink such poisonous stimulants, but milk – the milk too diluted with dirty rain water – dirty with Cambridge soots – to be enjoyable. But no doubt you have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment, only I wish you wouldn’t talk about Nature in that foolish and innocent tone of voice – you call it making jokes, and I suppose you think it’s nice, but I don’t like it a bit – I’ve told you why lots of times.
He also wrote to his cousin Erica with a description of his new abode.
I’ve been home for ten days and came here on Friday. It is a lovely village on the river above Cambridge. I’m in a small house, a sort of cottage, with a dear plump weather-beaten kindly old lady in control. I have a perfectly glorious time, seeing nobody I know day after day. The room I have opens straight out onto a stone verandah covered with creepers, and a little old garden full of old-fashioned flowers and crammed with roses.
That July, the eminent Welsh-born painter Augustus John camped by the Orchard, in the field by the river, prompting Brooke to write to Noel:
Augustus John (the greatest painter) (of whom I told you) with his wife and seven children (all ages between three and seven years) with their two caravans and a gypsy tent, are encamped by the river, a few hundred yards from here – I go and see them sometimes and they come here for meals … yesterday Donald Robertson, Dudley Ward and I took them all (the children) up the river in punts, gave them tea and played with them. They talked to us of an imaginary world of theirs, where the river was milk, the mud honey, the reeds and trees green sugar, the earth cake, the leaves of the trees (that was odd) ladies’ hats, and the sky Robin’s blue pinafore … Robin was the smallest.
The arrival of John, with his gypsy-like countenance, immense stature, earrings and long red beard, caused such a stir in Grantchester
and Cambridge that expeditions were organised by the likes of Jacques Raverat to the field in which John was camping. Their intrigue and fascination at the unusual sight moved John to comment: ‘we cause a good deal of astonishment in this well-bred town.’ At a time when gypsies were being persecuted, John was desperately trying to imitate their lifestyle and become a non-blood brother. Eddie Marsh had already bought one of his paintings and Rupert himself was ‘quite sick and faint with passion’ on seeing another of his works, and decided to set aside enough money to buy two A. J. drawings. While Augustus John was causing a stir in the meadows of Grantchester, Rupert was creating his own ripples at King’s. This profile on him appeared in The Granta written by Hugh Dalton:
Rupert Brooke came into residence at Cambridge in October 1906. The populace first became aware of him when they went to see the Greek play of that year, The Eumenides, and many of them have not yet forgotten his playing of the Herald.
He brought with him to Cambridge a reputation both as an athlete and as a poet, a combination supposed by vulgar people to be impossible.
He represented Rugby at cricket and football, rose to high rank in the Volunteer Corps, and was not unknown as a steeplechaser. He also won a prize poem…
At Cambridge he has forsaken a few old friends and entered many new ones. While a Freshman he used on occasions to represent his college in various branches of athletics, but soon dropped the habit, in spite of protests. On his day he is still an irresistible tennis player, preferring to play barefooted, and to pick up the balls with his toes.