Forever England

by Mike Read

  Dining-Room Tea

  When you were there, and you, and you,

  Happiness crowned the night; I too,

  Laughing and looking, one of all,

  I watched the quivering lamplight fall

  On plate and flowers and pouring tea

  And cup and cloth; and they and we

  Flung all the dancing moments by

  With jest and glitter. Lip and eye

  Flashed on the glory, shone and cried,

  Improvident, unmemoried;

  And fitfully and like a flame

  The light of laughter went and came.

  Proud in their careless transience moved

  The changing faces that I loved.

  Till suddenly, and otherwhence,

  I looked upon your innocence.

  For lifted clear and still and strange

  From the dark woven flow of change

  Under a vast and starless sky

  I saw the immortal moment lie.

  One instant I, an instant, knew

  As God knows all. And it and you

  I, above Time, oh, blind! could see

  In witless immortality.

  I saw the marble cup; the tea,

  Hung on the air, an amber stream;

  I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam,

  The painted flame, the frozen smoke.

  No more the flooding lamplight broke

  On flying eyes and lips and hair;

  But lay, but slept unbroken there,

  On stiller flesh, and body breathless,

  And lips and laughter stayed and deathless,

  And words on which no silence grew.

  Light was more alive than you.

  For suddenly, and otherwhence,

  I looked on your magnificence.

  I saw the stillness and the light,

  And you, august, immortal, white,

  Holy and strange; and every glint

  Posture and jest and thought and tint

  Freed from the mask of transiency,

  Triumphant in eternity,

  Immote, immortal.

  Dazed at length

  Human eyes grew, mortal strength

  Wearied; and Time began to creep.

  Change closed about me like a sleep.

  Light glinted on the eyes I loved.

  The cup was filled. The bodies moved.

  The drifting petal came to ground.

  The laughter chimed its perfect round.

  The broken syllable was ended.

  And I, so certain and so friended,

  How could I cloud, or how distress,

  The heaven of your unconsciousness?

  Or shake at Time’s sufficient spell,

  Stammering of lights unutterable?

  The eternal holiness of you,

  The timeless end, you never knew,

  The peace that lay, the light that shone.

  You never knew that I had gone

  A million miles away, and stayed

  A million years. The laughter played

  Unbroken round me; and the jest

  Flashed on. And we that knew the best

  Down wonderful hours grew happier yet.

  I sang at heart, and talked, and ate,

  And lived from laugh to laugh, I too,

  When you were there, and you, and you.

  The paving stones, laid by Napoleonic prisoners of war a century before, still lead up to the house, dappled by the shade from the magnificent beech trees high above Crediton. The postal facilities at Clifford Bridge being nonexistent, it has been deemed over the years most likely that Brooke posted his package of poems to publisher Frank Sidgwick from Crediton, thereby dating the ‘Dining Room Tea’ episode as 30 August ex silentio. They proved to be the only collection of his poems he saw published in his lifetime.

  In the evening at Penton, Miss Montague suggested they all went to Crediton Fair, where a version of the popular drama The Lyons Mail was to be performed. The party took up the entire front row at a shilling a ticket, before moving on to the fair, where they saw a girl who looked uncannily like Ka Cox – who at that moment was making her way with Virginia to the Clifford Bridge camp. Pauly Montague’s sister Ruth, who was present at the tea, recalled:

  [I]n return for tea my Mother and I were invited to spend the day at the camp at Clifford Bridge – she rode her bicycle and I my pony – returning in the dark. As I was young Rupert and Justin decided that a ball game was the best way to entertain me. I remember an enormous meal of stew cooked by my brother Paul, in which someone discovered a button. Afterwards we watched Rupert looking very beautiful swimming up and down in the river.

  Ruth was later befriended by Ka Cox while at the Slade School of Art, and Justin Brooke would propose to her but withdraw the offer after she decided she needed time to think about it. She married another, becoming Mrs Pickwoad, and surviving her brother Paul (who was killed in the First World War) by some seventy-odd years, passing away in the late 1980s at the age of ninety.

  Today, the Beeches is much as it was in 1911, apart from having being divided in two by Maurice Webber in the mid-1950s; the dining-room is intact, complete with its fireplace – and the alabaster Buddhas, squatting on the mantelpiece in the old picture, still preside over meal times.

  Not everyone was a lover of the principles of Bedalian-style expeditions. James Strachey disappeared, to join his brother Lytton at nearby Becky Falls, after one night huddled in a blanket, sitting up especially to see the sun rise in an attempt to get into the mood of the camp. Rupert wrote the following couplet allegedly about him, although Noel Olivier felt it was written about Gerald Shove – either way it demonstrates that not all were willing or natural neo-pagans: ‘In the late evening he was out of place / And utterly irrelevant at dawn.’

  The more enthusiastic embarked on a 32-mile round walk to Yes Tor, to the north-west of the camp, and organised a manhunt on the return journey, in which Bryn Olivier became the quarry and succeeded in gaining the camp without being caught. At night there were songs around the fire as Pauly Montague played his Elizabethan gittern, possibly inspiring Rupert in his dissertation on ‘John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama’ at which he was working by day. Brooke used an apt quote for one at that time living a rough and ready outdoor existence, from Webster’s Appius and Virginia: ‘I wake in the wet trench, loaded with more cold iron than a gaol would give a murderer, while the General sleeps in a field-bed, and to mock our hunger feeds us with the scent of the most curious fare. That makes his tables crack!’ His dissertation argued both for and against Appius and Virginia being the work of John Webster, eventually reaching the conclusion that it was, in his opinion, from the pen of Thomas Heywood. The work, partly written in the meadow by the Teign at Clifford Bridge, won him his fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, and was published in book form in Britain and America in 1916.

  Today the Clifford Bridge camp site plays host to far more than the handful of neo-pagan tents of 1911. The tranquil and idyllic area where Brooke read Webster, Keats’s letters to Fanny Browne, and crafted ‘Dining-Room Tea’ now bustles with holidaying families.

  Rupert arrived back at the Old Vicarage to discover that Frank Sidgwick of Sidgwick and Jackson, who had agreed to publish his first book of poetry, was objecting to the title of one of the poems. ‘Lust’ wasn’t the first of the works intended for inclusion that had raised Sidgwick’s eyebrows. ‘The Seasick Lover’, which had originally been ‘A Shakespearean Love Sonnet’, he also found faintly objectionable. Against his better judgement, and having argued his points, Rupert conceded that if it were absolutely necessary the title ‘Libido’ could be substituted for ‘Lust’. ‘The Seasick Lover’ became ‘A Channel Passage’. He complained to friends of the enforced changes, but seemed to accept them with a degree of equanimity if any other course meant losing sales. The excitement of having his first volume of poetry published was tempered by Dudley Ward’s betrothal to his German girlfriend Anne Marie,
as this meant, in his eyes, that yet another friend was shedding their skin of youth to become domesticated. Francis and Frances Cornford were an item; so were Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin. His thoughts turned to Ka, as he still imagined Noel to be out of his reach – at least physically – while Ka might just not be…

  The increasingly domiciliary attitude of his friends seemed only to fuel his restlessness; he implored Ka to join him doing something romantically exciting and interesting: ‘I am getting excited. Lincolnshire? The Peaks? The Fens? East London? Lulworth, if you like, but somewhere.’ In another spirited outburst to Ka, he declared that ‘I’m determined to live like a motor car, or a needle, Mr Bennett [Arnold Bennett], or a planetary system, or whatever else is always at the keenest and wildest pitch of activity’. At the same time, he was still professing his love to an ostensibly ambivalent Noel.

  In October 1911 he wrote to Ka Cox of a drama at the Old Vicarage, which happened in the middle of a letter he was writing to her:

  I’ve been the last half hour with my arms up a chimney. The beam in the kitchen chimney caught fire. ‘These old houses!’ we kept panting. It was so difficult to get at, being also in part the chimney piece. Only Mrs Neeve, I and Mr Wallis at home. Mr W. dashed for the brigade on his motorbike. An ever so cheerful and able British working man and I attacked the house with buckets and a pickaxe.

  During October, Rupert was becoming increasingly stressed, worrying about the lack of work he felt he had put into his dissertation on Webster, being in love in different ways with both Noel and Ka, and rushing backwards and forwards between Rugby, Grantchester, Cambridge and London. In the capital, he walked Hampstead Heath, stayed with James Strachey in Belsize Park, saw Wagner’s Ring Cycle, ate at the National Liberal Club, talked with Eddie Marsh and moved into the second floor of the studio of the Strachey’s cousin, the artist Duncan Grant, at 21 Fitzroy Square. He also took time to correct the proofs of his forthcoming poetry book.

  Bizarrely, for someone not musically gifted, Rupert decided he would like to have singing lessons and asked Clive Carey, with whom he had worked on various Cambridge productions, if he would be available: ‘If I was taught singing by some sensible person who understood all the time that I couldn’t ever sing properly whatever happened, I might gain anyhow two things. 1. Be able to hear music … 2. Have a better and more manageable reading voice.’ As late as 1957, while adjudicating at Bournemouth at a Music Competition Festival, Carey spoke warmly of Brooke and again in the 1960s commented, ‘he was a very close friend of mine and a wonderful person in all respects’. He declined to comment on Rupert’s singing ability, but did once persuade him to air his voice among others and take the part of a slave in a Cambridge production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

  Despite not being comfortable on stage, Rupert certainly worked hard on any role he had to take. There are two photographs of him reciting Faustus at the Old Vicarage to Jacques Raverat and Dudley Ward, who appear to be testing him on his lines. On another occasion he sat up in one of the chestnut trees reading aloud to Noel Olivier and Sybil Pye. Sybil remembered those moments with fondness.

  The peculiar golden quality of his hair. This hair escaping from under the crown, flapped and leapt … Our sitting-room was small and low, with a lamp slung from the ceiling, and a narrow door opening straight on to the dark garden. On quiet nights, when water sounds and scents drifted up from the river, this room half suggested the cabin of a ship. Rupert sat with his book at a table just below the lamp, the open door and the dark sky behind him, and the lamplight falling so directly on his head would vividly mark the outline and proportions of forehead, cheek and chin, so that in trying afterwards to realise just what lent them, apart from all expression, so complete and unusual a dignity and charm, I find it is to this moment my mind turns.

  The romance of the house itself was tempered by the presence of an army of woodlice, about which Rupert was once moved to comment:

  [T]hey will fall into my bed and get in my hair. The hot weather brings them out. They climb the walls and march along the ceiling. When they’re above me they look down, see with a start – and a slight scream – that there’s another person in the room and fall. And I never could bear woodlice. Mrs Neeves sprinkles yellow dust on my books and clothes, with a pathetic foreboding of failure, and says, ‘They’re ’armless, poor things!’ But my nerve gives.

  Brooke’s volume of poems was published in November, although he was in no mood to be excited about the prospect, as the long hours put in revising his dissertation on Webster had worn him out, and left him feeling rundown. His book didn’t set the literary world on fire immediately, but from a humble start it went on to sell almost 100,000 copies in the next twenty years alone.

  A reading party was being organised at Lulworth Cove to begin after Christmas 1911 and run into the new year. The circle included Lytton and James Strachey, Ka Cox, Justin Brooke, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and an old Bedalian and King’s man, Ferenc Bekassy, a Hungarian with more than a passing passion for Noel. Henry Lamb was to join the party, but he was staying locally in Corfe Castle.

  Before Lulworth, Rupert slept a night at Ka’s flat at 76 Charlotte Street in London, before joining his mother in the Beachy Head Hotel high up on the cliffs looking down on Eastbourne, Sussex. It was here he completed his dissertation on Webster, but his restless mental state, workload and general ill-health were taking their toll. He was jaded and overwrought, and suffered from insomnia while staying at Beachy Head – a strangely wild, windy and remote setting for a December break.

  Brooke’s literary mentor Eddie Marsh was now Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and as such was becoming increasingly influential. So it was good news that he was enamoured with Rupert’s volume of poems: ‘I had always in the trembling hope reposed that I should like the poems … but at my wildest I never looked forward to such magnificence … you have brought back into English poetry the rapturous beautiful grotesque of the seventeenth century.’ Rupert was delighted, writing to Marsh from his mother’s house in Rugby just before Christmas, ‘God! It’s so cheering to find someone who likes the modern stuff, and appreciates what one’s at. You can’t think how your remarks and liking thrilled me.’

  Chapter 8

  Monsters of the Darkest Hell Nibbled My Soul

  ON 27 DECEMBER 1911, Rupert and the others descended on Lulworth. Brooke himself stayed with Mrs Carter at Churchfield House, a dwelling that began as a simple cottage and was converted in the early seventeenth century by Lawrence Randall, in whose family it stayed until 1870. In the 1750s it became the Red Lion – the name being taken from the coat of arms of the local Duberville family. George III dined there in 1802 and sang its praises. After 1870 it became Churchfield House.

  This was to be Rupert’s most traumatic stay in Lulworth. Lytton Strachey was there, too, while others were at Cove Cottage; Henry Lamb arriving later, from Corfe, allegedly at Lytton’s behest, as there seemed to be a potential dalliance in the air between Lamb and Ka Cox. Rupert was uncommunicative and reclusive, becoming increasingly paranoid as Ka revealed to him her feelings for Henry Lamb. Despite an understanding with Noel Olivier, Brooke’s relationship with her seemed to be standing still, if not becoming cooler. Even so, Ka’s revelations were not designed to provoke any latent jealousy in Rupert. They not only provoked but inflamed him swiftly, to the point of unreasonable paranoia; Brooke suddenly believed himself in love with Ka much in the same way that Lysander seemingly irrationally transferred his affections from Hermia to Helena in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But who was the mischievous Puck at Lulworth? Rupert for a long time, and in retrospect unfairly, blamed Lytton Strachey for plotting the whole Ka Cox/Henry Lamb saga. In reality it was Lamb’s weakness for women and overt flirtatiousness combined with Ka’s susceptibility.

  In depressed state he walked with James Strachey from Lulworth over the Purbeck Hills to Corfe Castle, where James caught a tr
ain to London and Brooke walked on further to Studland, before returning to Lulworth. His state of mind worsened to such an extent that he had a nervous breakdown of sorts and became temporarily obsessed by Ka. He wrote from Churchfield House to Noel on 6 January:

  I have been ill and feeling very tired; and as the days go by I get worse. Also, I can’t get my plans settled even for the nearest future, and I don’t know what I shall be feeling in even two or three days. It isn’t your ‘fault’ this time! In addition to all the other horrors, there’s now a horrible business between me and Ka – we’re hurting each other.

  Only the week before he had written to Noel proclaiming, ‘I love you: any how. I love you. I love you. I wish you were here.’

  In this run-down state, he was taken to Dr Craig, a Harley Street specialist, who recommended rest, a special diet and a holiday. Dr Craig confirmed his diagnosis to Mrs Brooke – ‘Your son was obviously in a state of severe breakdown when I saw him. He was hypersensitive and introspective.’ He was due to join his mother in Cannes anyway, but first he flew to Noel in Limpsfield, this time to counsel her about Ka. Breaking his journey to the south of France in Paris, he was looked after by his friend Elizabeth Van Rysselbergh, before heading to Cannes and the Hotel du Pavillion to join his mother. Rather than letting things lie, taking his time and regaining his mental equilibrium, he proceeded to bombard Ka with letters padded with declamatory overtures: ‘Love me! Love me! Love me! … I love you so much’; ‘I love you so … I kiss your lips’; ‘I’m all reaching out to you, body and mind.’ He described to her the view from his balcony overlooking the Mediterranean; ‘Outside there are large numbers of tropical palms, a fountain, laden orange trees and roses. There’s an opal sea and jagged hills with amazing sunsets behind.’ He was also very descriptive about a moment some eighteen months earlier when he’d first seen Ka in a different light: