Yes, and back.
There and back?
But he didn’t want to tell her about the terrible marches and the sickness. He would, fairly soon, go back to all that, the canoes and the mud huts and the bursts of fire from river banks; yes, he had to go back, but that was not what he came to Sancreed for. He wanted to hear her voice, though he could hear no sound now beyond the birds in the square church tower. When he opened his eyes he read the simple facts on the small stone again. Then he stood up and took two upright paces back, as an officer, before he bent his head. Below, the grass showed the patches where his feet and his knees had pressed.
Promise you’ll come back.
I’ll come back.
And stay alive?
I’ll do my best.
Even though I broke my promise?
I’ll come back.
Even though I’m useless?
I’ll come back, Florence. Trust me.
Without turning for a final look, because he knew he would be back, Gilbert walked through the shadow of the tower and from the churchyard and cycled slowly back down the lanes towards the sea and Lamorna, and by the time he arrived at Laura’s, with dusk falling and his face cold, he had composed himself.
All rag tag and bobtail, Laura was waiting for him with a big hug and a warm hearth, with rabbit soup and a flavouring of onion, and some home-cured ham.
In Harold’s studio that night, just before he went to bed, Gilbert placed his lamp on the table. The room was full of the familiar smell of oil paint. There was an old cot, full of unused canvases, and the parcel left for him had a familiar shape too. It was large and flat. An envelope was glued to the brown wrapping and the writing on the envelope was in a familiar hand.
Captain C.G. Evans
Gilbert sat on Harold’s wooden chair, next to his easel, and opened the envelope.
Dear Ev,
I know you will come back to Lamorna and, when you do, I hope you will accept this.
A.J.M.
Gilbert took off the brown paper, making sure his fingers kept well clear of the surface. In his hands he held, close to the lamp, Morning Ride, the portrait of Florence on Merrilegs.
The Future and the Past
Dame Laura Knight (1877-1972) was only the second woman to be elected a full Royal Academician (1936). When the President addressed the Academy he began not with ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ but with ‘Gentlemen … Laura, you’re one of us’.
Given all that had happened, Harold Knight (1874-1961) was not disappointed to leave Cornwall in 1920. He recovered his health and was elected to the Royal Academy one year after Laura.
Joey Carter-Wood was killed in France in 1916.
Major Gilbert Evans, Deputy Surveyor General in Nigeria, retired in 1933 to Lamorna to live in the clifftop house he started to build in 1912. He died in Penzance in 1966.
Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1944. In 1949, the year in which he retired from that position, he made a controversial speech.
Author’s Note
Anyone who has read the autobiographies of Sir Alfred Munnings and Dame Laura Knight will know how indebted I am to them. Anyone who has read them will also know that Munnings does not say one word about the central events in Cornwall described here, while Laura Knight alludes to them only in the most tantalising way.
The two excellent biographies of Munnings, The Englishman (1962) by Reginald Pound and What a Go! (1988) by Jean Goodman, do address the years he spent in Lamorna and were of course invaluable.
When travelling and ‘reading around’ the period I became absorbed in, and influenced by, the work of A.C. Benson and Adrian Bell.
Winston Churchill plays a very small, non-speaking part in Summer in February, but the fellow commonership given to me by Churchill College, Cambridge, helped me, in a large way, to complete it.
I am very grateful to Brian Manning for encouraging me to start on this story; and above all to David Evans, the younger son of Major Gilbert Evans, without whose detailed and sympathetic co-operation this book would have been impossible.
* In fact it is a valley, But you are not Sally. Because you are Blote, It had to be ‘moat’!
Summer in February Page 28