by Mike Read
He was homesick not for England in general – after all, he had only just completed the circuitous route of Rugby, Rye, Limpsfield Chart, Bank, Limpsfield Chart, Rugby and London – but for Grantchester. In a letter to Ka on the train to Germany he admitted his unashamed nostalgia for the Old Vicarage, as fragments and ideas for a poem were clearly beginning to form themselves in his mind. ‘I fancy you may be, just now, in Grantchester. I envy you, frightfully. That river and the chestnuts come back to me a lot. Tea on the lawn. Just wire to me and we’ll spend the Summer there.’ At the Café des Westens his ideas became notes, the notes became couplets and the couplets began to form what was to become one of his two most famous and enduring poems. On its completion he dispatched it to the editor of the King’s magazine, Basileon, preceded by a telegram: ‘A masterpiece on its way.’
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow…
Oh! There the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
– Oh, damn! I know it! And I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe…
‘Du lieber Gott!’
Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; – and there the dews
Are soft between a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten’s not verboten.
ειθε γενοιμην … would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! –
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low…
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day-long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester…
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespoint, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by…
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean…
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.
God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of that district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridgeshire people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! Ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told)…
Ah God! To see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? And Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
Ka joined Rupert in Berlin, but his physical passion for her was no longer there, as he told Dudley:
I remain dead. I care practically nothing for any person in the world. I’ve anxiety, and a sort of affection, for Ka – But I don’t really care. I’ve no feeling for anybody at all – except the uneasy ghosts of the immense re
verence and rather steadfast love for Noel, and a knowledge that Noel is the finest thing I’ve ever seen in the world, and Ka – isn’t.
Ka fell ill in Germany, and Rupert’s mental equilibrium was still inharmonious and out of kilter, causing them to put the future on hold. She returned to her sister Hester in London, while Rupert, in a state of torpor, wrote to Jacques Raverat, ‘my love for Ka was pretty well at an end – poisoned, dead – before I discovered she was after all in love with me.’ Despite the finality of his feeling when writing to friends, his communications with Ka still gave her hope: ‘Hadn’t we better fix a date? The end of July? Would that do? It’s madness for me to make up my mind now, isn’t it?’ He also confesses to a ‘mechanical dull drifting through the days’. He felt, though, that he owed her something and was going through the motions of what he imagined to be doing the right thing by her.
James Strachey joined Rupert in Berlin and the two of them journeyed to the Hague. Rupert eagerly devouring Hilaire Belloc’s new book The Four Men at the Hotel des Indes where they were staying. The tale – a journey under the downs of Sussex – was to have a profound effect on him, the verses at the end of the work eventually inspiring his most quoted poem, ‘The Soldier’.
Chapter 9
Hope Springs Eternal (Alexander Pope)
BACK IN LONDON came a little occupational therapy for his confused mind: a play with the Cornfords, a gathering of the Apostles and a meet with E. M. Forster, who was also staying at Raymond Buildings with Eddie Marsh. From Gray’s Inn, it was a fleeting visit to see his mother before retiring to his spiritual home, the Old Vicarage. He was glad to discover that God was in his heaven, and indeed all was right with the world – at least this little plot. Mrs Neeve was still there, so was the honey, and his poem had been published in Basileon. Bryn Olivier impressed the family at The Champions when she read it to them over Sunday breakfast; while Eddie Marsh thought it ‘the most human thing you’ve written, the only one that has brought tears to my fine eyes’, and implored him to ‘never write anything so good again without my knowing’. It was admired not only by friends: eminent poets Edmund Gosse and Austin Dobson were enraptured, as was the writer and fellow of King’s, G. Lowes Dickinson.
Rupert’s general misery was compounded in July by the news of the death of one of his oldest friends, Hugh Russell-Smith’s brother Denham. He had written quite often to Denham, who usually answered his letters by return of post. The family that had made him envious with their obvious good nature were shattered by his early death in July 1912, aged just twenty-three. It was only after Denham’s death that Rupert confessed, in a letter to James Strachey, to an experimental sexual dalliance that he and the younger Russell-Smith had had at the Orchard in the autumn of 1909.
The Autumn of 1909! We hugged and kissed and strained, Denham and I, on and off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly in the smaller of the two dorms. An abortive affair, as I have told you. But in the Summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 at Brockenhurst, he had often taken me out to the hammock after dinner, to lie entwined there.
Of the one-off escapade at the Orchard he wrote, ‘I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin.’ He was, inevitably, disillusioned by what he believed was going to be a quantum leap from virginity to sexual knowledge. Despite the rushed, unsatisfactory night in his bedroom at the Orchard, the two remained good friends and did not speak of the moment again. As far as can be ascertained it was Brooke’s only real homosexual experience, apart from schoolboy experimentation at Rugby.
In spite of being run-down, taking strong sedations to help him sleep and living with the knowledge that sooner rather than later he must address the situation with Ka, he joined a summer reading party at a hostelry situated on the extreme north-east edge of Salisbury Plain. Maynard Keynes attempted to go one better than the previous year’s camp at Clifford Bridge by taking over the Crown at Everleigh for a few weeks and inviting a mixture of Apostles and Brooke’s neo-pagan/old Bedalian circle. Keynes had recently become interested in riding, so maybe he discovered the Crown via Cobbett’s Rural Rides or, less likely, through the knowledge that the 1897 (and 1898) Grand National winner, Manifesto, came from the stables at the Crown Inn! The Crown Inn at Everleigh was originally built as the Dower House, being converted to its present use around 1790. The journalist and reformer William Cobbett stayed at the Crown on 27 August 1826, commenting in Rural Rides:
This Inn is one of the nicest, and in Summer one of the pleasantest in England; for I think my experience in this way will justify me in speaking thus positively. The house is large, the stables good, the Landlord a farmer also, and therefore no cribbing your horses in hay or straw, and yourself in eggs and cream. The garden which adjoins the south side of the house is large, of a good shape, consists of well-disposed clumps of shrubs and flowers and of short grass very neatly kept. In the lower part of the garden there are high trees and among these a most populous rookery.
The area was once so open that one could ride from Everleigh to Salisbury, a distance of about 10 miles, without jumping a fence or opening a gate.
Among Maynard’s guests were his brother Geoffrey, Daphne, Bryn and Noel Olivier, Justin Brooke, Rupert, James Strachey, Apostles Gerald Shove and Gordon Luce and Frankie Birrell. The company rode, played croquet and walked, as they wished, and read from Jane Austen in the evenings. Noel’s notes about the occasion reveal that Brooke was no horseman, and took no part in the riding side of the activities. The Crown possessing only some five or six bedrooms, the party took over the whole inn with the exception of the small bar for the locals. Maynard, whose inclinations were then exclusively homosexual, seemed disenchanted with the female contingent, and annoyed by Rupert’s overtures to Bryn, confessing in a letter to Duncan Grant,
I don’t much care for the attitude these women breed and haven’t liked this party nearly so much as my last week’s [guests were coming and going at different times], Noel is very nice and Daphne very innocent, but Bryn is too stupid and I begin to take an active dislike to her. Out of the window [his bedroom overlooked the garden] I see Rupert making love to her – taking her hand, sitting at her feet, gazing into her eyes. Oh these womanisers. How on earth and what for can he do it?
Rupert’s nerves and emotions, coupled with the heavy medication, contributed to his irrationality and confusion while at Everleigh. He was flirting outrageously with Bryn – inviting her to go boating with him the following month – only to be told, when cornered, that she wanted to take Hugh Popham as well. Rupert’s incredulity forced her to confess to him that she had, in fact, decided to marry Popham. Rupert was distraught, and not only reneged on the boating arrangements but refused to say goodbye to her when she left Everleigh. His feelings seemed to be all over the place as he wrote to Noel from the Crown after her departure.
I had tea, sat a little, walked for miles alone, changed – I don’t know what the time is, or where anybody is. There seems nothing to do but write to you … it’s so damned full of you this place. There are many spots where we walked, the lawn where I saw you in so many attitudes, all you, there’s this room – why shouldn’t you swing round the door now? – You did yesterday, this morning, the day before yesterday … Oh Noel if you knew the sick dread with which I face tonight – that bed and those dragging hours – And the pointlessness of tomorrow, the horror that it might just as well be this evening, or Wednesday, for all the pleasure or relief from pain I get out of it. The procession of hopeless hours – That’s what’s so difficult to face; – that’s why one wants to kill oneself. It’s all swept over me. These last few days; and so much stronger and more certain than before – and rather different too. It seems deeper and better – Oh I can’t explain it all … Remember those days on the river: and the little camp at Penshurst, next year – moments then; and Klosters: and the Beaulieu camp: and our evenings by that great elm
clump at Grantchester: and bathing in early morning by Oxford: and the heights above Clifford Bridge camp: and a thousand times when we’ve gone hand in hand – as no two other people could … you must see what we are child – I cannot live without you. But remember, I’m not only in love with you, I’m very fond of you. Goodnight, child – in the name of our love.
Fine words, but to write them to Noel, who had watched Rupert openly flirting and making romantic overtures to her sister Bryn during the previous few days, points to him being close to a relapse following his nervous breakdown earlier in the year. In a further letter to Noel, written at the Crown, he reiterates his emotions and feelings for her: ‘Noel, Noel, there’s love between you and me, and you’ve given me such kindness and such sympathy in your own Noel way – I’m wanting your presence so much – I’m leaning on you at this moment, stretching towards you.’ To complicate the issue even further, in the same letter he discussed his impending meeting with Ka, as she was awaiting a decision from him as to their future together. To Noel he confided: ‘I couldn’t ever live with her, I know from experience even, I should go mad, or kill her, in a few months. And – I love someone else. We’ve got to part. I suppose she really knows that by now. But I’ve got to tell her tomorrow.’ And he did. Justin Brooke drove him away from Everleigh, the Crown, the Keynes’ poker games and the croquet to a meeting place by the roadside at Bibury, where Ka was staying at the Swan. She and Rupert went off for three hours to discuss their relationship while Justin waited in his Opel. It was the end. Ka was inconsolable and Rupert riddled with guilt; it was the sour icing on the stale cake of his stay at Everleigh. His state of mind that weekend, and his being at such an all-time low, led to Frances Cornford suggesting that he go abroad for a while. Although he didn’t eventually take her advice until the following May, with beneficial results, he never sank so low again.
Rupert was, though, overcome himself with his own grief and guilt about ending the relationship. He poured his anguish into a letter to Noel.
You see, child – Noel – there’s been so much between Ka and me. We’ve been so close to one another, naked to each other in our good parts and bad. She knows me better than anyone in the world – better than you let yourself know me – than you care to know me. And we’ve given each other great love and infinite pain – and that’s a terrible, unbreakable bond. And I’ve had her … it’s agony, agony, tearing out part of one’s life like that … You see I have an ocean of love and pity for her … I’d give anything to do Ka good. Only – she killed something in me. I can’t love her, or marry her.