Forever England

by Mike Read

  Can they be drowned in Time, and nothing left

  To the revolving hard, enamelled world,

  Full, full forever of fresh fears and births

  And busyness, of all you were? Perhaps

  A thousand years ago some Greek boy died,

  So lovely-bodied, so adored, so young,

  Like us, his lovers treasured senseless things,

  And laughed with tears remembering his laughter,

  And there was friendship in the very sound

  Of his forgotten name to them. Of him

  Now we know nothing, nothing is altered now

  Because of all he was. Most loved, on you

  Can such oblivion fall? Then, if it can,

  How futile, how absurd the life of man.

  All his friends remembered him, in their own ways, which included verse and music. One of his many Cambridge colleagues, Raglan H. E. H. Somerset, recalled:

  I used to wake him on Sunday mornings to bathe in the dam above Byron’s Pool. His bedroom was always littered with books, English, French, and German, in wild disorder … we used to go back and feed, sometimes in the Orchard and sometimes in the Old Vicarage garden on eggs and that particular brand of honey referred to in the ‘Grantchester’ poem. In those days he always dressed in the same way: cricket shirt and trousers and no stockings…

  ‘The Old Vicarage Grantchester’ inspired Sub-lieutenant Jeffrey Day to write his poem ‘An Airman’s Dream’. He wrote ‘I had sent myself to sleep and endured dull sermons by thinking of my house and its surroundings.’ Day was shot down and went missing in February 1918.

  Fellow poet John Drinkwater grieved for him:

  There can have been no man of his years in England who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal to the affection of everyone who knew him, while there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since Shelley. Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and shapely zest that are his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity.

  While the tributes poured in, the war was gathering momentum and many of his friends would also die. Hugh Russell-Smith was killed a year after Brooke’s own death, by which time his old home Watersgreen House, where Brooke had spent many a happy hour lazing in the hammock in the garden, had become a nursing home, caring for wounded Indians, before becoming a centre for the wounded soldiers of New Zealand.

  Cynthia Asquith wrote in her diary on 27 April:

  So very sorry to hear [about] Rupert Brooke … I have only met him once or twice, never got to know him, but always looked forward to doing so some day and it does stab one to think of this beautiful young poet’s face with that cornfield head. He had the most lovely regard I have ever seen I think. Poor Eddie will be broken-hearted – I think he was his favourite protégé.

  Eddie Marsh was indeed broken-hearted, as he expressed in his letter of condolence to Mrs Brooke:

  It is the great sorrow I could have, and I dare not think what it must be to you – I have never known or heard of anyone like him – his genius and his beauty, his wisdom, honour, gentleness and humour made him such a man as seldom lived. Everybody loved him, there was no one who had so many devoted friends and so many charmed acquaintances.

  With those words Marsh set the tone for his memoir of Rupert, which appeared to glorify Brooke and therefore be condemned by his mother. Initially she was grateful to Marsh for his support and devotion to Rupert, and asked him to use his influence to obtain special leave for Alfred, adding a comment about Rupert: ‘The many painful attacks of illness which he had as a boy would fill a book … All my life and surroundings are so bound up in him, my sitting room is full of his books and things waiting for his return as my heart is.’ Gradually, however, areas of Rupert’s life of which she had no knowledge emerged, arousing in her, one suspects, a not unnatural jealousy of a world that Rupert had shared more with Eddie and his circle than with her. Cathleen Nesbitt’s name came up, and not for the last time she had to write to Eddie for a wider picture, a scenario she undoubtedly came to increasingly resent.

  Late in May, Marsh’s grief was still as fresh as he poured out his heart to Violet Asquith.

  It was sad and sweet to see the places he had loved so much … every ray and every leaf and flower seemed to cry out for him – the elm-clumps greatly standing, the mayfields all golden showing, the sleepy grass and the collapse of hours – all his lovely phrases came back to me, and most of all ‘Her sights and sounds, dreams happy as her day’ … dear old Winston, at dinner last night, had suddenly broken out, apropos nothing, in the midst of discussing his own troubles, that nothing had grieved him, or went on grieving him, so much as Rupert’s death…

  Mrs Brooke, strong as she was, was becoming morbidly inconsolable as the reality of her son’s death hit her. Dudley Ward and Jacques Raverat went to the Old Vicarage to sort out papers, letters and books, with the worried Mrs Neeve not certain that she was doing the right thing by consenting to it, without Mrs Brooke’s knowledge. The Ranee, in accordance with Rupert’s wishes, was happy for Eddie to be the literary executor, but she felt that his personal letters should perhaps go to her at Rugby. She was unaware of Rupert’s plea to Dudley to destroy some of them. Always a loyal friend, he made sure that they went to Raymond Buildings for sorting. Meanwhile the tributes continued.

  One of Rupert’s peers at Cambridge wrote this short but colourful cameo of him: ‘Suddenly a freshman, with long and not unhyacinthine locks, was seen to tear through the muddy scrum. It was Rupert Brooke, and we paused in our game to observe this semblance of a Greek god in a football shirt.’ Another friend, although more a contemporary of Rupert’s younger brother Alfred, poured out his feelings in a letter to Mrs Brooke in June 1915: ‘Cambridge and King’s particularly are full of ghosts for me, and I fear they will soon be so full that I shall feel more at home among the ghosts than I do among the living.’

  June saw the publication of Rupert’s 1914 and Other Poems, and the death in action of Denis Browne. The following week, Marsh and Henry James spent an evening together, Marsh reading Browne’s letter relating the details of Rupert’s last moments. James was deeply affected: ‘The ghost telling of the ghost moved me more than I could find words for.’

  Bereavement was making Mrs Brooke edgy, and she felt that Marsh was organising Rupert’s letters, books and photographs without consulting her. He was undoubtedly more able to deal with Rupert’s literary legacy than she was, but what the Ranee saw was it all happening with indecent haste. Marsh was shaken even more by the deposing of Churchill as First Sea Lord, and he was as faithful to him as he had been to Rupert. Mrs Brooke’s life was shattered on receiving news that her only surviving son, Alfred, had been killed by a mortar bomb at Vermelles, France, while serving as a reserve machine-gun officer in the Post Office Rifles. Within a fortnight, Eddie took Rupert’s belongings from the SS Grantully to her at Rugby, ‘and when we got upstairs and I opened the boxes she broke down – I have never seen such suffering.’ The items included clothing and a lock of Rupert’s hair.

  From Rugby, Marsh went to Wilfred Gibson’s house, the Old Nailshop, where he began his memoir of Brooke. During his stay on 10 June Gibson wrote a poem commemorating the first time Eddie had introduced him to Rupert and they had gone to King’s Cross to watch a timber yard on fire.

  To E. M. (In memory of R. B.)

  The night we saw the stacks of timber blaze

  To terrible golden fury, young and strong

  He watched between us with dream-dazzled gaze

  Aflame, and burning like a god of song,

  As we together stood against the throng

  Drawn from the midnight of the city ways.

  To-night the world about us is ablaze

  And he is dead, is dead … Yet, young and strong

  He watches with us still with deathless gaze

  Aflame, and burning like a god of so
ng,

  As we together stand against the throng

  Drawn from the bottomless midnight of hell’s ways.

  Marsh finished his memoir in eight days, in a little room at the top of the house, before suggesting to Henry James that he write a preface to Brooke’s Westminster Gazette articles that Marsh was also preparing for publication. Ironically, Marsh’s fear that Mrs Brooke might not like the memoir and his paving the way with unnecessarily mollifying notes made her worry far more than she would have otherwise. He glossed over love affairs, referred to Cathleen Nesbitt as ‘X’ and insisted that he wanted only to do justice and honour to Rupert and to use only material with which Mrs Brooke would be happy. She hated feeling that the Rupert publicity machine was happening in spite of her feelings, and feared that a memoir at that moment, while so many were still dying, was not in the best taste. Marsh felt it important that the memoir should appeal to the youth of the country. She blocked it, insisted that it be postponed for at least a year, as well as being reworked: ‘It is too evidently written by someone who knew him for a comparatively short time and even for that time quite a small part of him.’ She was right, but even as his mother, she knew very little of major parts of his life. So who would be best qualified to write a memoir? The simple answer was no one person. There were so many different aspects to his make-up that friends and acquaintances were shown different faces, moods, character traits and displays of temperament, and any truly well-balanced account of him would have to include contributions from everyone who knew him. While Mrs Brooke acknowledged that Marsh meant well, she must have felt that the memoir turned the son she had known into a son she did not know, with even the intimacy of his memory being taken away from her.

  However, there was much she did not know. Rupert’s romance with Eileen Wellesley had been conducted with a high degree of discretion. There were two main clues to its actual depths. Several months earlier, Marsh’s housekeeper, Mrs Elgy, had discovered Eileen’s hairpins in Rupert’s bed at Raymond Buildings, and an entry in Cynthia Asquith’s diary for 3 July 1915 added fuel to the fire:

  Mary Herbert [a close friend of Eileen Wellesley] disobeyed her mother and came to see me in the afternoon. She told me Eileen Wellesley claims very serious love affair with Rupert Brooke saying that quite unsuspected of everyone else they used to meet in Richmond Park and Eddie’s flat. No doubt Rupert Brooke had the thoroughly polygamous instincts of most poets.

  John Masefield, who was now undertaking a lot of work for the British Red Cross, was working with its motor boat ambulance service, which involved, among other things, taking small craft out to the Dardenelles. It was his intention, en route, to land on Skyros and visit Rupert’s grave, but by early September heavy weather had set in, making it impossible to go ashore. Instead he painted three small watercolours of the island from different angles, and later presented them to Eddie Marsh. On returning home, he wrote his vivid and moving impression of the island, and his memory of Rupert.

  The Island of Skyros

  Here, we stood together, we three men,

  Before the war had swept us to the East

  Three thousand miles away, I stand again

  And hear the bells, and breathe, and go to feast.

  We trod the same path, to the selfsame place,

  Yet here I stand, having beheld their graves,

  Skyros whose shadows the great seas erase,

  And Seddul Bahr that ever more blood craves.

  So, since we communed here, our bones have been

  Nearer, perhaps, than they again will be,

  Earth and the worldwide battle lie between,

  Death lies between, and friend-destroying sea.

  Yet here, a year ago, we talked and stood

  As I stand now, with pulses beating blood.

  I saw her like a shadow on the sky

  In the last light, a blur upon the sea,

  Then the gale’s darkness put the shadow by,

  But from one grave that island talked to me;

  And, in the midnight, in the breaking storm,

  I saw its blackness and a blinking light,

  And thought, ‘So death obscures your gentle form,

  So memory strives to make the darkness bright;

  And, in that heap of rocks, your body lies,

  Part of this crag this bitter surge offends,

  While I, who pass, a little obscure thing,

  War with this force, and breathe, and am its king.’

  In Rupert’s last letter to Noel Olivier dated 10 January 1915 he commented on the fact that another of her suitors, and fellow King’s man, Ferenc Bekassy, had also enlisted: ‘Dreadful if you lost all your lovers at once,’ adding rather cryptically – ‘Ah, but you won’t lose all!’ Bekassy was killed not long after Rupert. Noel was distraught at both deaths, declaring that there was no chance now that she’d ever marry for love. She did marry, though. In 1919, two years after qualifying as a doctor, she married a Welsh colleague, Arthur Richards, and bore him a son and four daughters. Bizarrely, in 1932 she began a ten-year love affair with James Strachey. James’s overtures to Rupert having been rejected as had Rupert’s to Noel, the irony would surely have affected Brooke’s delicate nervous system had he lived.

  In October 1915, six months after Brooke’s death, his American friends at the Chicago Little Theatre, Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg, produced his play Lithuania, in conjunction with Andreyev’s Pretty Sabine Women. In Rupert’s play, Ellen portrayed the daughter, the father being played by Browne, who also directed the piece. In having his play performed at the Little Theatre, Brooke’s name was added to the list of illustrious playwrights whose works had been performed there, among them Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw and Yeats. The cover for the slim volume of the published play was designed by C. Raymond Johnson, who also staged the play. The production ran for three weeks, but was a financial disaster, failing to appeal to its rapidly dwindling audiences. Notwithstanding the work’s lack of success, Brookes increasing popularity in the States caused a rapid escalation of the price of the published play. Initially selling for 35 cents, it soon became so sought after that the Chicago cognoscenti were paying $20 for a single copy within the decade.

  Rupert’s play would be performed again two years later at the Social Theatre, by the Varsity Players, with Van Volkenburg again taking the role of the daughter and Adolph Axelrad playing the father. The programme notes talk up what is really quite an ordinary play:

  A small edition of the play was printed and published by the Chicago Little Theatre: this edition has long been out of print and is now one of the rarities of modern literature. The play itself is extraordinarily grim and powerful, avoiding melodrama only by the skill with which it’s handled; its terrible intensity recalls the murder scene in Macbeth and indicates the dramatic heights to which Rupert Brooke might have risen.

  In Wilfred Gibson’s 1916 collection of poetry entitled Friends, the opening poem was called simply ‘Rupert Brooke’.

  Rupert Brooke

  I

  Your face was lifted to the golden sky

  Ablaze beyond the black roofs of the square,

  As flame on flame leapt, flourishing in air

  Its tumult of red stars exultantly,

  To the cold constellations dim and high;

  And as we neared, the roaring ruddy flare

  Kindled to gold your throat and brow and hair

  Until you burned, a flame of ecstasy.

  The golden head goes down into the night

  Quenched in cold gloom – and yet again you stand

  Beside me now with lifted face alight,

  As, flame to flame, and fire to fire you burn…

  Then, recollecting, laughingly you turn,

  And look into my eyes and take my hand.

  II

  Once in my garret – you being far away

  Tramping the hills and breathing upland air,

  Or so I fancied – brooding in my chair, />
  I watched the London sunshine feeble and grey

  Dapple my desk, too tired to labour more,

  When, looking up, I saw you standing there,

  Although I’d caught no footstep on the stair,

  Like sudden April at my open door.

  Though now beyond earth’s farthest hills you fare,

  Song-crowded, immortal, sometimes it seems to me

  That, if I listen very quietly,

  Perhaps I’ll hear a light foot on the stair,

  And see you, standing with your angel air,

  Fresh from the uplands of eternity.

  III

  Your eyes rejoiced in colour’s ecstasy

  Fulfilling even their uttermost desire,

  When, over a great sunlit field afire

  With windy poppies, streaming like a sea

  Of scarlet flame that flaunted riotously

  Among green orchards of that western shire,

  You gazed as though your heart could never tire

  Of life’s red flood in summer revelry.

  And as I watched you little thought had I

  How soon beneath the dim low-drifting sky

  Your soul should wander down the darkling way,

  With eyes that peer a little wistfully,

  Half-glad, half-sad, remembering, as they see

  Lethean poppies, shrivelling ashen grey.

  IV

  October chestnuts showered their perishing gold

  Over us as beside the stream we lay

  In the Old Vicarage garden that blue day,

  Talking of verse and all the manifold

  Delights a little net of words may hold,

  While in the sunlight water-voles at play

  Dived under a trailing crimson bramble-spray,

  And walnuts thudded ripe on soft black mould.