by Mike Read
You’d for some reason got on a low dress. I looked at the firm and lovely place where your deep breasts divided and grew out of the chest and went down under your dress … and I was suddenly very giddy, and physically hit with a glimpse of a new sort of beauty that I’d not quite known of.
Would he have had such a sudden physical fixation for her were it not for her interest in Henry Lamb? Probably not, but he convinced her to meet him in Munich where they could be together: sleep together. In the meantime, he had to rub along with Mendelssohn, Ravel, Mozart and Saint-Saëns at Cannes concerts.
Suspicious of the increasing correspondence arriving for Rupert, Mrs Brooke soon realised something was afoot. She felt he should spend more time recuperating and that he was not yet fit to travel, but her protestations fell on stony ground. Despite some ‘awful scenes with the Ranee’, it was arranged that Ka would meet him off the train at Verona and they would return a few days later to where she was staying in Munich. In the event they also visited Salzburg and Starnberg. In his agitated condition, which erupted spasmodically during their time there, he was becoming more and more dependent upon her, growing stronger from her supportive presence, while she became increasingly strained. They were clearly not ‘in love’, he desiring her for release from physical pressures and as a cushion, while she was willing to be submissive. Because of Rupert’s delicate mental balance, she had to pick her moment to let him know that she had, in fact, been seeing Henry Lamb while Rupert was recuperating in Cannes.
He was unwittingly the cause of Rupert and Ka being forced together in a way that wasn’t right for either of them. He liked her as a friend, and ended up believing he was in love with her, his protestations of love while his mind was a little unbalanced eventually convincing her. He soon realised that he did not really want the security of Ka but it was too late for her – she now believed that Rupert was the man for her and it was only his mental state that would make it sometimes appear otherwise.
Although it wasn’t immediately apparent, Rupert began to cool by degrees towards Ka from the end of their time together in Germany. His manner towards her became more matter of fact and at times off-hand, and, although he wrote to her five times in one weekend during March, from the Mermaid Inn at Rye, Kent, the letters had a different tone from those written in Cannes, and Noel’s name crept into them more than once.
His feelings of guilt towards Ka, that he had used her, were to be with him for the rest of his life, but in the short term he played along with the façade until he was forced to be honest about his feelings later in the year. In May he was to confide to Jacques:
I go about with the woman dutifully. I’ve a sort of dim, reflected affection for something in her … love her? Bless you, no! but I don’t love anybody. The bother is I don’t really like her. There is a feeling of staleness, ugliness, trustlessness about her.
Before Rye, Rupert repaired to Rugby. Ka came to stay with him and great plans were laid to avoid Mrs Brooke’s suspicions of a relationship or that they had met in Germany. Edward Marsh and Geoffrey Keynes also arrived, Rupert impressing on Keynes the importance of not letting his mother know too much about his personal life: ‘Relations between the Ranee and me are very peculiar.’ Then Rupert went to the Mermaid with James Strachey, a friend of Richard Aldington, the owner’s son, who was to become an eminent poet and writer.
The famous inn, which probably dates from 1156, certainly ‘stood on this present site, built of wattle, daub, lath and plaster’ in 1300, when the Mermaid brewed its own ale and charged a penny a night for lodging. It was rebuilt in 1920 using ships’ timbers and baulks of Sussex oak, the fireplaces being carved from French stone ballast rescued from the harbour. Long associated with smugglers, it would now be referred to as a ‘no-go’ area, especially during the eighteenth century, when the 600-strong Hawkhurst gang openly flaunted their illicit activities without fear of reprisals, with consummate ease. By 1912, however, life at the Mermaid was a little more civilised, as Brooke revealed in one of his letters to Ka.
We’re in a Smoking Room. They’re all in evening dress, and they talk – there are these people in the world – about Bridge, Golf and Motoring. They’re playing bridge. But then the most extraordinary thing is about ‘Colonel’ Aldington, May, Anabel and Dick. Because – it turns out – they keep the Inn. (Very Old place – you see these beams?) She’s written a book of poems and several novels. And Dick – but Dick’s been a flame of James’ for years. One’s almost further from you among the upper classes than elsewhere. Oh Lord! And in the Dining Room … but James, or I’ll, tell you all about it.
The following day (Sunday) he wrote again to Ka. ‘I’m just out a walk to Winchelsea’, obviously so mentally overwrought that he omitted the ‘for’. He ends the letter, ‘You’d better marry me before we leave England, you know. I’ll accept the responsibility. And the fineness to come.’ In yet another epistle written on Mermaid notepaper to Ka on the Sunday evening he complained: ‘Oh God, we’ve been searching for rooms in Winchelsea. No luck,’ but extolled the virtues of Rye’s neighbour: ‘Oh, and Winchelsea’s so lovely. On the road back we met a small lady who was lost, and I was (nervously) kind to her and restored her, practically to her Mother. Ha! I read The Way of All Flesh, and talk to James and think of you.’ Brooke’s walk to Winchelsea, 2 miles of marshland away from Rye, ran between the road and the railway. Elsie M. Jacobs described it in 1947:
[I]t was much used before people got too lazy to walk; old folk still speak of it as the shortcut. It is so seldom used now that the path is almost obliterated, but the bridges over the dykes are intact, a most important consideration on the marshes … Do not attempt this walk in mist or fog, as even a slight mist will rain the view and cause endless worries about the path … The land on which you walk was once the bed of the sea and here in August 1350 sailed forty large Spanish ships. Edward III and the Black Prince commanded fifty good ships and pinnaces of the smaller type. A stirring naval battle was fought and fifteen of the enemy were sunk or captured!
Brooke also described to Ka an evening foray to Lamb House, just around the corner from the Mermaid in West Street.
James and I have been out this evening to call on Mr Henry James. At nine. We found, at length, the House. It was immensely rich, and brilliantly lighted at every window on the ground floor. The upper floors were deserted: one black window open. The house is straight on the street. We nearly fainted with fear of a Company. At length I pressed the Bell of the Great Door – there was a smaller door further along, the Servant’s door we were told. No answer. I pressed again. At length a slow dragging step was heard within. It stopped inside the door. We shuffled. Then, very slowly, and very loudly, immense numbers of chains and bolts were drawn within. There was a pause again. Further rattling within. Then the steps seemed to be heard retreating. There was silence. We waited in wild, agonising stupefaction. The House was dead-silent. At length there was a shuffling noise from the Servants’ door. We thought someone was about to emerge from there to greet us. We slid down towards it. Nothing happened. We drew back and observed the house. A low whistle came from it. Then nothing happened for two minutes. Suddenly a shadow passed, quickly, across the light in the window nearest the door. Again nothing happened. James and I, sick with surmise, stole down the street. We thought we heard another whistle, as we departed. We came back here shaking – we didn’t know at what. If the evening paper, as you get this, tells of the murder of Mr Henry James – you’ll know.
Despite Brooke’s intriguing description of the mysterious scenario, the American author Henry James was actually in London at the time – at the Reform Club – so his life was never in danger from the chain-rattling whistler!
The arrival of Henry James at Lamb House in 1896 had seemed to herald the birth of a literary era for Rye, as his visitors included distinguished English contemporary writers Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and G. K. Chesterton, as well as French anglophile Hilaire Belloc and Americ
an literary luminaries Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane. The younger literati, not of his peer group, came too in the shape of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf (Virginia Stephen had by this time married Leonard Woolf), E. M. Forster and E. F. Benson – the latter eventually taking the property on three years after James’s death in 1916.
Albert Edward Aldington, the owner of the Mermaid, wasn’t actually a colonel; Anabel was Arabella – a nickname only, her real name was Dorothy Yorke – an American girlfriend of Dick’s who lived until her eightieth year. He called her Dolikins. Even Dick was an adopted name, Edward Godfrey Aldington calling himself that from an early age. The mother, Jessie May, to whom Brooke refers, wrote five novels and two books of poems between 1905 and 1917, while the youngest daughter Patricia was only four years old at the time and spent her days in the garden, where the car park is now, climbing the big old tree that used to stand there. Patricia Aldington still lives in Rye, where she used to take an active role in the running of the museum, and still remembers Brooke’s visit.
In 1919 Dick Aldington wrote to a friend:
I am thinking of collecting all my war poems – I have about sixty or seventy – into a book. Do you think the USA would care for them? They are seventy – not popular – I mean they are bitter, anguish-stricken, realistic, not like Brooke or Noyes or anybody like that. They are the stern truth and I have hesitated about publishing them.
The disparaging attitude that he had about Brooke’s war poems was not entirely fair, as Aldington was to see the war out and therefore be in a position to write a more balanced view – a chance not afforded to Rupert.
On 31 March, Rupert wrote to Jacques Raverat; ‘I leave here tomorrow evening. I go to Noel’s then to Ka Wednesday evening? Till Friday? Then I don’t know where: Winchelsea or the New Forest.’
He determined to call at Limpsfield Chart to see Noel, before going on to Ka at Woking. Still uncertain of his feelings, he also wrote to Noel from the Mermaid. ‘There is no doubt you’re the finest person in the world. How dare I see you.’ But Rupert wasn’t Noel’s only suitor. As well as Ferenc Bekassy, Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s brother, was now making overtures to Noel and appeared at The Champions. From Ka’s house Rupert wrote to Jacques Raverat: ‘I’m going tomorrow to c/o Mrs Primmer, Beech Shade, Bank, Lyndhurst. I’m going to leave Ka alone till she’s rested and ready for Germany. I found her (I came yesterday) pretty bad.’
This stay at Bank, in April 1912, found him in a totally different mood to the lovestruck 22-year-old who had gone ‘dancing and leaping through the New Forest’ in 1909. His nervous breakdown following the jealousy and paranoia over Ka Cox’s dalliance with Henry Lamb, and his own subsequent affair with her, had left his nerves taut, his behaviour erratic and his state of mind irrational. Their love-making in Germany resulted in Ka becoming pregnant with Brooke’s child, but a subsequent miscarriage circumvented any hurried talk of marriage plans; in any case, he continued to feel disenchanted with the relationship, seeing Ka as a ‘fallen woman’.
Ka was attempting to be philosophical about the situation, while her friends feared for her general well-being. The relationship between Rupert and Ka was to be awkward for some time while before the channels of communication became a little more open. The potential threat of extramarital parenthood with all its implications, although now averted, was clearly pushing him towards a second breakdown, causing him to escape to the solitude and happy memories of Beech Shade with the loyal James Strachey. On 6 April he wrote to Noel:
I say, being here, you know; and precisely three years – Easter time – Oh Lord! Mrs Primmer is well. The trees are there. The black hut stands. Also the holly-bush. And the room. Oh! Dearest Noel, you were good. It’s incredible – I didn’t know there were such things as you in the world!
The black hut stood, until recent times, on a clearing near the house, and the holly-bush – which grew nearby – remained until it was taken down as late as the 1950s when the track was metalled. To Ka he wrote a more factual, conversational note.
James had to leave me to solitude … I sit and read and write … it is fine but not warm. The beeches are in bloom. Also the junipers and arbutuses and so forth. We went walks and enjoyed the scenery. James pointed to a clump of larches and said ‘Birches! … ah! Birches! Birches are a wonderful tree’ … Mrs Primmer is, of course, the most amazing cook in the world. Four-course dinners, absolutely perfect. One eats a lot. I think of staying here for ever.
Despite his apparent joy at the solitude that was now his, in reality he didn’t want to be left alone, and following James’s departure, his anxious entreaties to Bryn Olivier brought her to Bank – probably more out of concern for his state of mind than any other reason. Whether in a cry for help or a dramatic pose, he talked of suicide and of buying a revolver, apparently searching the shops at Brockenhurst for a suitable firearm, treading the pathway towards insanity one moment and relapsing into a sentimental lassitude the next. Almost as an automaton he wrote to Hugh Dalton:
Friend of my laughing careless youth, where are those golden hours now? Where now the shrill mirth of our burgeoning intellects? And by what doubtful and deleterious ways am I come down to this place of shadows and eyeless pain? In truth I have been for some months in Hell. I have been very ill. I am very ill. In all probability I shall be very ill. It is thought by those who know me best (viz myself) that I shall die … I do nothing. I eat and sleep and rest. My thoughts buzz drearily in a vacuum … I am more than a little gone in my head, since my collapse.
Probably kept sane by the excellent home cooking of Mrs Primmer, he waxed lyrical about her culinary expertise in a letter from Beech Shade to Maynard Keynes: ‘I’m here, under the charge of Brynhild at present. Most charming. And about my intellectual level … Oh! Oh! Mrs Primmer’s five-course dinner is on the table – funny she should be the best cook in England. Brynhild, a little nervously, sends you her love.’ His black mood also came through in a letter to the poet James Elroy Flecker: ‘I galloped downhill for months and then took the abyss with a leap … nine days I lay without sleep or food. Monsters of the darkest Hell nibbled my soul.’
April also brought the gloomy news that he had failed to obtain his fellowship. Rupert later confided to Bryn, ‘I’d been infinitely wretched and ill, wretcheder than I’d thought possible. And then for a few days it all dropped away and – oh! – how lovely Bank was!’ During those days at Bank, he must have seen her as a lifeline in his hour of need, and felt that closeness that a patient in hospital so often does with their nurse.
‘The best cook in England’ outlived Brooke by thirty years and her husband by twenty, Mrs Primmer passing away in 1945 at Bridport, while Beech Shade and the rest of the hamlet of Gritnam nearly became a victim of the motor age when Royal Blue Coaches attempted to buy the clearing in which the handful of cottages stood, in order to demolish it and create a coach park. Fortunately the Gritnam Trust was formed which put paid to the plan, but Beech Shade and the adjoining cottage were pulled down and rebuilt in the late thirties after falling into the hands of the Forestry Commission. The new house bears the name of its predecessor and, although not dissimilar in style, is different - the best example of how Beech Shade looked during Brooke’s day is its near neighbour Woodbine Cottage.
In a rootless and agitated frame of mind Rupert returned briefly to Limpsfield Chart, before heading to the anonymity of London. Ka was now convinced that Rupert’s feelings for her were cooling. They met in Trafalgar Square, close to where he was staying at the National Liberal Club. She was in tears and he was comforting, but undoubtedly going through the motions of consoling her, as the beginnings of guilt gnawed at him. He escaped to Berlin to stay with Dudley Ward, who was about to marry his girlfriend Anne Marie Von der Planitz, on 11 May in Munich, but he did ask Ka to go and visit. No doubt her pragmatism detected a faint demurring in his suggestion. Nevertheless she agreed to join him at some point.
Near the station in the Berlin district of Charlott
enburg, the Café des Westens was where Brooke took to sitting, reading and writing, well away from the wedding preparations, and leaving Dudley space to write his articles for The Economist. The café proved the unlikely setting for two major trains of thought for Rupert. First, a friend of Dudley’s told him a tale there. The action had allegedly taken place in Lithuania the previous year. A boy who had run away from there at the age of thirteen, returned as a man, unrecognised by his own family. They put him up for the night, and the daughter, encouraged by the parents, killed him for his money. When the truth was revealed, they were overcome with grief and remorse. Whether true or apocryphal, and the story is an old one, it was to sow the seed for his only play, Lithuania, which would be produced three and a half years later in America. The other work that germinated at the Café des Westens was the poem that eventually became ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. Initially entitled ‘Home’, it then became ‘Fragments of a Poem to be Entitled “The Sentimental Exile”’.