Forever England

by Mike Read

  On the extreme left the boat comes to her muddy mornings and I am seen unshipping the rudder, then Harold (Hobson) is seen grumbling on his way to fetch wood, then the big tent and Ka and you cooking, then Dudley (Ward) and the Financial Times and Rupert and all.

  Choosing a moment when he and Noel were alone gathering wood together, Rupert plucked up the courage to ask her to marry him. Surprisingly, she agreed, but added the caveat that it was to be their secret, and he was not to tell a soul. Not surprisingly, it was soon common news in the camp. Jacques Raverat later summed up how the situation appeared to the other campers at Buckler’s Hard:

  She accepted the homage of his devotion with a calm, indifferent, detached air, as if it were something quite natural. No doubt she was flattered by his attentions, for she cannot have failed to see something of beauty and charm. Also, she saw how he was sought out, admired, showered with adulation on every side. But he did not inspire respect in her; she found him too young, too chimerical, too absurd.

  Brooke celebrated his twenty-third birthday in the clearing haunted by blackheaded gulls, oyster-catchers, lapwings, redshanks and curlews on the very spot where three of Nelson’s fleet were built.

  On his return to Grantchester, he discovered that Mrs Stephenson had people staying in his rooms, so briefly he decamped to the Old Vicarage next door. During the previous September when he was looking for somewhere, Rupert had described the house, garden and inmates to Lytton Strachey:

  The Neeves are ‘working people’ who have ‘taken the house and want lodgers’ (beware of that plural). So far they have been singularly unsatisfied. Mr Neeve is a refined creature, with an accent above his class, who sits out near the beehives with a handkerchief over his head and reads advanced newspapers. He knows a lot about botany. They keep babies and chickens, and I rather think I have seen both classes entering the house. But you could be firm. The garden is the great glory. There is a soft lawn with a sundial and tangled, antique flowers abundantly; and a sham ruin, quite in a corner … Oh, I greatly recommend all the outside of the Old Vicarage. In the Autumn it will be Usher-like. There are trees rather too closely all around; and a mist. It’s right on the river. I nearly went there: but I could find no reason for deserting our present place.

  He eventually would live there, but that was in the future.

  In the late summer, James Strachey, Hugh Dalton and Rupert were back at the Fabian summer school in Llanbedr, Brooke and Strachey sleeping under their own blankets on the floor of one of the stables. The Society was still using Pen-yr-Allt, Caer-meddyg and their associated outbuildings. By now Beatrice Webb, a prime mover in the setting-up of the summer schools, was becoming disenchanted with them:

  We have had interesting and useful talks with these young men, but the weather, being detestable, must have made the trip appear rather a bad investment for them, and they were inclined to go away rather more critical and supercilious than they came. Quite clearly we must not attempt it again unless we can ensure the presence of twenty or thirty leading dons and attractive celebrities. ‘They won’t come unless they know who they’re going to meet,’ sums up Rupert Brooke … They don’t want to learn, they don’t think they have anything to learn … the egotism of the young university man is colossal. Are they worth bothering about?

  Nevertheless, Brooke:

  We all loved Beatrice, who related amusing anecdotes about Mr Herbert Spencer over and over again … The Cambridge group teased her and founded an ‘Anti-Athletic League’ when she tried to organise long, uphill walks, but at least they were eager to talk to her and explain their point of view.

  The Oxford boys, however, appeared recalcitrant and antagonistic. Beatrice asked, ‘Why must these young men be so rude?’ On one occasion, the local police had to be called following unruly behaviour when the young Fabians vehemently supported each other against the hierarchy. If one of them was upbraided during a meeting, they would walk out as one body. After the summer school Rupert wrote to Geoffrey Keynes, ‘I’m just back from doing my accursed duty at the Fabian Summer School. It was really rather fun. A thousand different people from different parts of life.’ And to Ka Cox, ‘I went to Llanbedr. You ought to go one year, to learn a little about life, and to teach them a little about what? Anyhow it’s not so bad as you think … The Webbs too are very nice.’

  By 1911 the lease on Pen-yr-Allt would expire and a decision be taken to abandon North Wales and hold the schools at the Hotel Monte Movo at Saas Grund in the Swiss Alps, but Brooke would not be present.

  Rupert’s cousin Erica had become increasingly obsessed with George Bernard Shaw. Initially she sought advice from him, but her attentions were soon to become embarrassing, and Shaw suggested that she found someone of her own age to distract her from her hero-worship. The fact that he had entered into a correspondence with her about his plays, and explained that the expressions and feelings of the characters weren’t necessarily his own, served only to fan the flames. Her declarations of love became more intense and she even moved closer to the Shaws, to try to inveigle her way into their household. He lectured her on the fact that marriage was sacred and spoke of the ‘iron laws of domestic honour’, but it did little to discourage her. It is evident that Rupert knew nothing of the situation.

  During October 1910, Edward Thomas stayed with Brooke at the Orchard, as did E. M. Forster, who had just had his new novel, Howards End, published. Rupert returned to Froxfield Green to spend some time with Thomas while his wife was away. It is hard to imagine the two poets gelling – Brooke gregarious and youthful, Thomas an often unhappy and depressed man weighed down with financial worries. Nevertheless, they read aloud to each other Brooke’s latest poems, including ‘Flight’, which would have sounded perfect read aloud in the beech hangers.

  Flight

  Voices out of the shade that cried,

  And long noon in the hot calm places,

  And children’s play by the wayside,

  And country eyes, and quiet faces –

  All these were round my steady paces.

  Those that I could have loved went by me;

  Cool gardened homes slept in the sun;

  I heard the whisper of water nigh me,

  Saw hands that beckoned, shone, were gone

  In the green and gold. And I went on.

  For if my echoing footfall slept,

  Soon a far whispering there’d be

  Of a little lonely wind that crept

  From tree to tree, and distantly

  Followed me, followed me…

  But the blue vaporous end of day

  Brought peace, and pursuit baffled quite,

  Where between pine-woods dipped the way.

  I turned, slipped in and out of sight.

  I trod as quiet as the night.

  The pine-boles kept perpetual hush;

  And in the boughs wind never swirled.

  I found a flowering lowly bush,

  And bowed, slid in, and sighed and curled,

  Hidden at rest from all the world.

  Safe! I was safe, and glad, I knew!

  Yet – with cold heart and cold wet brows

  I lay. And the dark fell … There grew

  Meward a sound of shaken boughs;

  And ceased, above my intricate house;

  And silence, silence, silence found me…

  I felt the unfaltering movement creep

  Among the leaves. They shed around me

  Calm clouds of scent, that I did weep,

  And stroked my face. I fell asleep.

  Thomas noted that Brooke:

  [S]tretched himself out … drew his fingers through his waved, fair hair, laughed, talked indolently and admired as much as he was admired. No one that knew him could easily separate him from his poetry … he was tall, broad, and easy in his movements. Either he stooped, or he thrust his head forward unusually much to look at you with his steady blue eyes. His clear rosy skin helped to give him the look of a great girl.

&nb
sp; Brooke returned to Grantchester, inspired by his time with Thomas, just as Thomas himself was to be encouraged in his poetry by the American poet, Robert Frost.

  On 5 November 1910, Rupert was at Ye Olde George Hotel at Chatteris, some 20 miles north of Cambridge, where he scribbled down and sent to Jacques Raverat a poem entitled ‘Mummy’ that was later published in Poems 1911 as ‘Mummia’.

  Mummy

  As those of old drank mummia

  To fire their limbs of lead,

  Making dead kings from Africa

  Stand pandar to their bed;

  Drunk on the dead, and medicined

  With spiced imperial dust,

  In a short night they reeled to find

  Ten centuries of lust.

  So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme,

  Stuffed love’s infirmity,

  And sucked all lovers of all time

  To rarify ecstasy.

  Helen’s the hair shuts out from me

  Verona’s livid skies;

  Gypsy the lips I press; and see

  Two Antonys in your eyes.

  The unheard invisible lonely dead

  Lie with us in this place,

  And ghostly hands above my head

  Close face to straining face;

  Woven from their tomb, and one with it,

  The night wherein we press;

  Their thousand pitchy pyres have lit

  Your flaming nakedness…

  The following day Noel Olivier received a copy.

  This is a very rough unfinished copy of the sort of thing I shall send you on a postcard if you don’t write to me – even ten words to say you exist. Don’t ask me how I got here. I leave in five minutes … Farewell. Imagine, most unapproachable, a little figure stumping across the illimitable Fens, occasionally bowing to the sun because it reminds him of you.

  Rupert continued his verbal bombardment to Noel, who, now almost eighteen, was usually confused by the ravings in his letters:

  If I could only talk to you, ask you things. Two sensible people can say anything – anything in the world – to each other … I’m an infinitely vulgar nuisance … The world has given to you that you may have any emotion – violent lust, eternal hatred, infinite indifference – to me or to anyone else in the world, for as long or as short a time and at any moment you like.

  Noel had just returned from Prunoy, in France, where she’d been a guest of Jacques Raverat’s family. During her stay Rupert had sent Jacques a new sonnet.

  The Life Beyond

  He wakes, who never thought to wake again,

  Who held the end was Death. He opens eyes

  Slowly, to one long livid oozing plain

  Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens. He lies;

  And waits; and once in timeless sick surmise

  Through the dead air heaves up an unknown hand,

  Like a dry branch. No life is in that land,

  Himself not lives, but is a thing that cries;

  An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck

  Of moveless horror; an Immortal One

  Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly

  Fast-stuck in a grey sweat on a corpse’s neck.

  I thought when love for you died, I should die.

  It’s dead. Alone, most strangely, I live on.

  Rupert kept up the onslaught, his frustration seeming to intensify with each letter:

  [I]f I could only beat you suddenly on the nose, very hard, or pull your hair with painful and unexpected vehemence – Oh Noel, but I must see you. I weary you with another long slushy letter. I mistrust myself letter writing … I know I often fail to convey the effect I desire.

  On 6 December, he enclosed a sonnet written the previous spring; ‘Don’t go reading anything into it except itself. I’ve never seen you “cry and turn away”.’

  The Hill

  Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,

  Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.

  You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;

  Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,

  When we are old, are old…’ ‘And when we die

  All’s over that is ours; and life burns on

  Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I.

  – ‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’

  ‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.

  Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;

  ‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread

  Rose-crowned into the darkness!’ … Proud we were,

  And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.

  - And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.

  Noel appeared ambivalent to his poetry: ‘I liked the old “Mummy” poems better than this “we flung us” one.’

  During November, Rupert dined at Magdalene College with his friend A. C. Benson, who recorded Brooke’s physical attributes and countenance:

  He was far more striking in appearance than exactly handsome in outline. His eyes were small and deeply set. It was the colouring of face and hair which gave special character to his look. The hair rose very thickly from his forehead, and fell in rather stiff arched locks on either side – he grew it full and over-long, it was of a beautiful dark auburn tint inclining to red, but with an underlying golden gleam in it. His complexion was richly coloured, as though the blood were plentiful and near the surface; his face much tanned, with the tinge of sun-ripened fruit. He was strongly built, but inclined to be sturdy, and even clumsy, rather than graceful or lithe … his voice was far from beautiful, monotonous in tone, husky and somewhat hampered in the throat.

  Notwithstanding Benson’s comments about his voice, Rupert was a convincing speaker, addressing the Cambridge Fabians a month later for the last time as their president. His lecture was on ‘Democracy and the Arts’, and included various interesting observations and thoughts: ‘It seems to me that this century is going to witness a struggle between Democracy and Plutocracy’, and:

  Observe the situation and remember it’s a real one, not one in a book. (1) Art is important. (2) The people who produce art at present are, if you look into it, nearly always dependent on unearned income. (3) We are going to diminish and extinguish the number of those dependent on unearned income. We shall also reduce the number of those rich enough to act the patron to artists, and change in a thousand other ways the circumstances of the arts and of the artists.

  Brooke was clearly concerned that the system which enabled artists, writers and musicians to live was being destroyed, debating how much literature would have been lost to us, had writers over the centuries not received patronage:

  Poetry is even worse off than the other arts. Even Mr Rudyard Kipling could not live on his poetry. Very few poets, perhaps one or two in five years, sell 1,000 copies of a volume … An experienced publisher tells me no one in England makes £50 a year by poetry – except perhaps Mr Kipling and Mr Noyes.

  Brooke stressed the importance of contemporary art as opposed to excepting the standards of former generations: ‘Beware for the generations slip imperceptibly into one another, and it is so much easier to accept standards that are prepared for you. Beware of the dead.’

  Chapter 7

  When You Were There, and You, and You

  RUPERT HAD ALSO to beware of the living, in the shape of Mrs Stevenson at the Orchard, who had been getting increasingly disenchanted with the comings and goings at all hours of Rupert and his friends, and especially with his habit of going barefoot. The landlady and lodger reached an impasse, which concluded in him defecting to the Old Vicarage next door, with his beloved Granta running at the bottom of the garden.

  In 1380 Corpus Christi College had appropriated the Rectory at Grantchester, appointing the first vicar, William Wendye, and establishing a building on the site of the Old Vicarage, built on a strip of land that ran down to the river at a place where the locals extracted
gravel from a pit called Hog Hunch. The present dwelling was erected in the 1680s and remained as a vicarage until early in the 1820s, when it was advertised to be let, and was taken by the Lilley family who also owned Manor Farm. In the middle of the century Grantchester’s new vicar, William Martin, had a new vicarage built, and the old one was bought by a local market gardener, Samuel Widnall, on the occasion of his marriage to Elizabeth Smith; Widnall lived there until his death in 1894. The house then passed to his sister-in-law and subsequently a niece; she, having decided not to live in the house, installed Henry and Florence Neeve and their son Cyril as tenants. The fourth member of the family was the bull terrier that Brooke nicknamed Pudsey Dawson. The dog seemed equally at home in the Orchard and the Old Vicarage.

  No sooner had Rupert moved his things into the Old Vicarage than he announced that he was soon to leave for Germany and would return in May. Before going abroad, though, he returned to Lulworth early in the new year, staying again at Cove Cottage – with Gwen Darwin, Ka Cox and Jacques Raverat, the latter drawing Rupert’s portrait. Ka tried to buy Rupert a belated Christmas present of a book, and when he seemed indifferent as to what it was she was clearly hurt, for he felt compelled to write, ‘Oh tell me that you’re unhurt, for I hurt you in such a way, and I was mean and selfish, and you’re I think one of the most clear and most splendid people in the world.’ On 1 January 1911 he wrote ‘Sonnet Reversed’: