Rupert Brooke

by Nigel Jones

  Jacques took his friend to Bedales, unannounced, and Noel, glancing out of a window at the school, was amazed to see Brooke crossing the school yard. She rejected an invitation to take tea, but the brief meeting seems to have repaired the rift between her and Brooke that had opened in their letters. By way of a quid pro quo for this favour, Brooke agreed to do what he could to advance Jacques’ courtship of Ka Cox in his capacity as a fellow-member of the Cambridge Fabians’ committee. In view of Brooke’s own future involvement with Ka, this is not without irony.

  With his usual devious methods – using intelligence supplied by Dudley Ward and Margery Olivier – Brooke had discovered that the Oliviers were planning to hold a Bedales-style camp on the River Eden near Penshurst in Kent. The three younger sisters – without the watchful Margery – were under canvas, along with Dorothy Osmaston and their friend and neighbour Bunny Garnett, who had brought along a trio of male friends: Godwin Baynes, a strapping medical student whom Brooke had met at Klosters; Harold Hobson, an engineer; and Walter Layton, who was soon to become engaged to Dorothy. In a reprise of their Easter adventure in the New Forest, the campers were joined by Brooke and the faithful Dudley Ward, who both pretended to be just passing by.

  Edenbridge is the first occasion that Brooke encountered in practice the lifestyle of the group that was to become known as the Neo-Pagans. Although they were not all Old Bedalians, they had learned their liking for summer camps at Badley’s knee, and the etiquette for such holidays under canvas had already been laid down in writing by the school’s founding father:

  The Camp is always pitched near a bathing place, for Bedalians, like fish, cannot live long out of water … The Camp itself consists of four tents – the cook tent, one sleeping tent for the girls, and two for the boys. Bedding of straw, bracken, or heather is provided, and each camper brings with him three blankets, one of which is sewn up into a sleeping bag. Pillows most of us scorn; the most hardened do without, the others roll up their clothes, and thus make a good substitute … Every other day, at least, is spent in a good tramp across the country – ten or fifteen miles at first to get into training, but this may be increased to twenty, or even twenty-five, later on … We take sandwiches with us for lunch, thus avoiding an elaborate midday meal, and on the longer walks find tea on the way, arriving back at Camp in time for a bathe and supper. Then we adjourn to the neighbouring farmhouse (whence we get our bread, butter, eggs, and milk) and for the rest of the evening sit lazily, while the Chief [Badley] and another take turn and turn about in reading aloud some novel. After a strenuous day of walk, a slack day usually follows, with plenty of bathing and perhaps a short walk in the afternoon to get up an appetite for supper. Too many slack days, however, should be discouraged, as they mean extra work for the cook, and anyway we don’t come to Camp to slack …

  These rigorous ground rules owe much to Badley’s admiration for Baden-Powell’s Scout movement, then in its heroic infancy, which Badley praised for satisfying ‘the universal craving for adventure and for open-air life’. Where Badley parted company with the Chief Scout was in his emphasis on sexual equality and his tolerance of healthy nudism: ‘There is much to be said for the practice, where possible, of nudism as a means of mental as well as bodily health … amongst friends at camp for instance, it is perfectly possible and, I believe, all to the good. But I have never wished to make it the rule for all, as there are some whom it makes unwholesomely sex-conscious.’

  Noel had already blotted her copybook with Badley by diving nude off a high board in plain public view – an incident which caused him to ban nudity at Bedales thereafter. At Edenbridge, removed from the Chief’s vigilance, conditions were more relaxed, as Bunny Garnett recounts:

  On Sunday morning the rustics of Penshurst came down and leant in a line upon the parapet of the bridge, staring into the pool in which we were to bathe. ‘Come on’, said Daphne, ‘They’re not going to stop us.’ Nor did they. We bathed, ignoring them, and Noel, not to be put off from her high dives, picked her way along the parapet between the rows of wrists and elbows, politely asked for standing-room in the middle, and made a perfect dive into the pool. With florid expressionless face, the nearest labourer shook his black Sunday coat-sleeve free of the drops which had fallen from her heel.

  It was Bunny who had discovered the riverside camp-site, while on a cycling trip with Bryn from their nearby homes at Limpsfield Chart. Across the river stood the imposing edifice of Penshurst Place, the magnificent fourteenth-century mansion that had once been the home of Sir Philip Sidney, the chivalrous Elizabethan poet who, like Brooke, found an early death in a foreign field. Years later Bunny recalled Brooke’s arrival at the camp:

  … just after we’d all retired to sleep, there were gay shouts of greeting as we all emerged from sleeping bags and tents to find two young men from Cambridge had come to join us. They were Rupert Brooke and Dudley Ward. Rupert was extremely attractive. Though not handsome, he was beautiful. His complexion, his skin, his eyes and hair were perfect. He was tall and well built, loosely put together, with a careless animal grace and a face made for smiling and teasing and sudden laughter. As he ate in the firelight I watched him, at once delighted by him and afraid that his friendliness might be a mask. What might not lie below it?

  The days – and nights – passed in a welter of walking, swimming, eating and communal talks amid the scent of new-mown hay and what Brooke would call, referring to Grantchester, ‘the thrilling-sweet and rotten/Unforgettable, unforgotten/River-smell’. According to Bunny, Noel was by no means averse to the arrival of her persistent suitor:

  soon we were sitting round the blazing fire, Noel’s eyes shining in welcome for the new arrivals and the soft river water trickling from her hair down her bare shoulders. And on the white shoulders, shining in the firelight, were bits of duck weed, which made me love them all the more. The moon rose full. Soon we crawled back into our sleeping bags and slept, but Rupert, I believe, lay awake composing poetry.

  A poem that Brooke is thought to have written around this time gives an intriguing insight into his complicated sexual feelings. Frankly titled ‘Jealousy’, it portrays the poet consumed by the green-eyed monster as he contemplates a woman once so ‘wise and cool’ now ‘Gazing with silly sickness on that fool’. If the poem is indeed – as were most of Brooke’s verses – modelled on real people and events, then the description of the poet’s rival’s: ‘red lips … empty grace … strong legs and arms … rosy face’ would fit the muscular Rowing Blue Godwin Baynes; while the woman, or ‘lover-wife’ would more easily fit Brynhild than Noel. Bryn was indeed the object of Baynes’s attentions; he was to propose to her, unsuccessfully, a few weeks after the camp. The poem continues with a typical Brookian rant in which he catalogues his disgust with the body and the physical manifestations of love:

  —Oh! then I know I’m waiting, lover-wife,

  For the great time when love is at a close,

  And all its fruit’s to watch the thickening nose

  And sweaty neck and dulling face and eye,

  That are yours, and you most surely till you die!

  Day after day you’ll sit with him and note

  The greasier tie, the dingy wrinkling coat;

  As prettiness turns to pomp, and strength to fat.

  And love, love, love to habit!

  The hysterical note is maintained as the poet turns to contemplate the final stages of love’s disintegration into domestic decrepitude:

  And you, that loved young life and clean, must tend

  A foul sick fumbling dribbling body and old,

  When his rare lips hang flabby and can’t hold

  Slobber, and you’re enduring that worst thing,

  Senility’s queasy furtive love-making,

  And searching those dear eyes for human meaning,

  Propping the bald and helpless head, and cleaning

  A scrap that life’s flung by, and love’s forgotten,—

  Then you’ll be tired;
and passion dead and rotten;

  And he’ll be dirty, dirty!

  O lithe and free

  And lightfoot, that the poor heart cries to see,

  That’s how I’ll see your man and you!—

  But you

  —Oh, when that time comes, you’ll be dirty too!

  It could be expected of Brooke that when in the throes of love for Noel – and receiving some requiting from her – his attention should turn, like the fox with his unobtainable grapes, to the sister he had so briefly desired in the Swiss snows. As we shall see, jealousy burned like a pilot light in the murk of Brooke’s psyche, always ready to flare up into a reason-consuming blaze. It is more than possible that this is what he felt at Edenbridge as he watched Godwin with Bryn or Dorothy Osmaston and Walter Layton. He and Noel had the opportunity for one long solitary talk during a walk along the riverbank, from which they were picked up by boat at a prearranged spot by Dudley and Daphne Olivier. The would-be lovers had a chance to see each other naked when they bathed side by side one night by the light of a bicycle lamp. Noel, as she confided to a sympathetic enquirer towards the end of her life, was as impressed by her admirer in the buff as James Strachey had been. For Brooke, as ‘Jealousy’ makes all too plain, sexual experience was still a dangerous and demeaning experiment – one likely to tar the practitioner with an indelible mark of ‘dirt’, a ‘filthy’ badge of Cain, a stain that no river could wash off.

  Before the temptations of the Edenbridge interlude, Brooke had again travelled to Llanbedr to put in an appearance at the Fabian summer school. Once again he fretted under stricter rules than those that governed the Neo-Pagans – there were set times for meals, lectures and a veritable return to Rugby-style lights out. Activities were conducted under the disapproving eye of Beatrice Webb, who was present with Sidney to talk about the Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission, a Fabian tract that had been among Brooke’s reading matter in the New Forest at Easter.

  The Webbs had been members of a Commission appointed to overhaul the outdated Poor Law of 1834. While the majority of the commissioners had favoured a piecemeal reform, the Webbs had been among a minority of four who had argued for a root-and-branch change to the system of relieving poverty. The Webbs proposed a mixture of public and private charity based on local Boards of Guardians who oversaw the detested workhouses, where the indigent eked out an existence little better than slavery. They favoured a centralized system of dragooning the unemployed into work while providing their families with health care, pensions and relief. Within the Fabians they formed a group to agitate for the implementation of their ideas, the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution, and were actively looking for recruits to join and spread the word. Convinced and enthused by their arguments, Brooke eagerly signed up.

  As soon as he got back to Grantchester, he threw himself into the campaign with his customary zeal: leaflets advocating the abolition of the Poor Law were placed on a table at the Orchard for visitors to the tearoom to peruse, he distributed the pamphlets by bike from door to door in the village and he entertained to tea a working-class radical MP, Will Crooks. His fellow-Fabians Hugh Dalton, Ben Keeling and Ka Cox joined the campaign, and a grand meeting was planned for the Michaelmas term. Meanwhile summer’s lease still had some way to run, and further distractions beckoned.

  Brooke was expected to join his parents for their annual summer holiday late in August. The Brookes had rented a large Victorian vicarage at Clevedon in Somerset, overlooking the Bristol Channel. Bored by the prospect of weeks in the unstimulating company of his parents, Brooke prevailed on the Ranee to invite some of his friends to stay in the house’s many spare rooms in order to alleviate the tedium. Urgent signals were sent to James Strachey: ‘There are a lot of books here that you’ll like’; and to Dudley Ward: ‘My only way of keeping in touch with “life” is to play tennis barefoot. It’s not so effective as living in a tent and a river with three Oliviers: but it annoys the family … the family atmosphere is too paralysing. I am sinking. Save me, or I die.’

  On cue, in obedience to Brooke’s imperious invitations, on 26 August a horse-drawn carriage from the local station disgorged an enormous miscellany of his Cambridge cronies, together with a smattering of Neo-Pagans. Present were Hugh Dalton, Gerald Shove, Dudley Ward, Gwen Darwin, Margery and Bryn Olivier (though not Noel); and a couple of more marginal members of his Cambridge circle – Archie Campbell, a poet and Greek scholar who had played a part in Comus; and Frankie Birrell, grandson of Tennyson and son of the Liberal Cabinet Minister Augustine Birrell. The younger Birrell was a homosexual who had affairs with Maynard Keynes, Gerald Shove and the cheerfully bisexual Bunny Garnett. Later arrivals at Clevedon included Eddie Marsh, Jack Sheppard, Bill Hubback, a Cambridge economist and Fabian, and his fiancée Eva Spielman. There was even a brief visit from the great Maynard Keynes himself. For one brief and shining moment, Cambridge’s intellectual élite were concentrated in this corner of Somerset, clustering, like dusty moths round the flame of Brooke’s brilliance.

  The object of all this adoration took the influx lightly; but not so his mother, who kept a beady eye on the female members of the party, particularly the stunningly lovely Bryn. After observing Bryn at close quarters Mrs Brooke primly told Gwen Darwin: ‘I prefer Miss Cox. Her wrists are very thick and I don’t like the expression of her mouth, but she’s a sensible girl. I can’t understand what you all see in these Oliviers; they are pretty, I suppose, but not at all clever; they’re shocking flirts and their manners are disgraceful.’ Like Queen Victoria, Mrs Brooke had an aversion to homosexuals on the rare occasions when she recognized one for what he was – this prejudice lies behind her distrust of St John Lucas Lucas and her dislike of Marsh. But on this holiday, one of Brooke’s tutors, Jack Sheppard, a closet homosexual, insinuated himself into the Ranee’s good graces with such finesse that she later named him as an executor of her favourite son’s Estate.

  Brooke retailed his mother’s outrage at his friends’ en masse descent in comic letters to those who were missing out on the jamboree, telling Ka Cox: ‘They’ve come and gone, singly and in batches, and the Elder Generation couldn’t stand any of them.’ To James Strachey, who dropped by briefly ahead of the major incursion, he reported: ‘And since you left there have been recurring millions of people. All hated by my Family. “I have met so many brilliant, conceited young men” said my mother, bitterly, last night, apropos of Maynard. But she’d said, a week ago “I don’t call poor James clever”. Sheppard heads you, however, in popularity. There was nobody else they could stand.’

  Of the Oliviers, Brooke told James superciliously: ‘The treasurer [Margery] and her sister Brynhilde [sic] have been about; which, of course, pleased my vulgar tastes enormously. I discern a Meredithian Earth–Our Mother tint in the blood of Sir Syd. that takes me. I pine to watch dusky women snaring parakeets …’ In fact, Margery much displeased Brooke at Clevedon by taking him aside and warning him off Noel, having belatedly got to hear of the Edenbridge escapade. Whether her motives were jealousy or a more disinterested desire to protect her sister, Margery was seriously disapproving, as a surviving letter underlining her warning makes clear:

  If … you went on now so that she came to love you, have you thought how it would be with her? (I think I would find a way to kill you) … What is clear is that you must not bring this into her life now … I think I see that when a woman falls in love she does so much more completely and finally, she gets quite lost & absorbed in that one thing and cannot think of other things and her development almost ceases.

  It seems clear that in the aftermath of Edenbridge Noel was seriously affected by Brooke’s ardour. When he returned to Cambridge after a two-day visit to The Champions, the Oliviers’ family home at Limpsfield Chart, Noel sent him a telegram in German with a single quote from Schiller’s Wallenstein:

  I have tasted the fullness of earthly bliss

  I have lived and I have loved.

  The highlight
of Clevedon was Brooke’s own attempt to enlist his friends in a make-believe project demonstrating his own commitment to living and loving. The extraordinary idea arose during a cliff-top walk near the Bristol suburb of Portishead with Margery, Bryn, Dudley Ward and Bill Hubback. News had just reached them of the death of John Davidson, a fin-de-siècle Decadent poet, who had drowned himself in Cornwall, aged 51. His last poem, ‘The Testament of John Davidson’, had hymned the life of the open road as the best answer to decrepitude and death:

  I took my staff in hand; I took the road,

  And wandered out to seek my last abode.

  Hearts of gold and hearts of lead

  Sing it yet in sun and rain,

  ‘Heel and toe from dawn to dusk,

  Round the world and home again.’

  Brooke and his friends elaborated on the fantasy that Davidson had merely faked his death in order to escape his previous existence and the burden of responsibility and failure. The more they talked, the more the idea appealed to them – or at least to the persuasive Brooke – as the perfect solution to the decline of youth into the humdrum mediocrity of middle age. Brooke told Jacques excitedly:

  The idea, the splendour of this escape back into youth, fascinated us. We imagined a number of young people, splendidly young together, vowing to live such an idea, parting to do their ‘work in the world’ for a time and then, twenty years later, meeting on some windy road, one prearranged spring morning reborn to find and make a new world together, vanishing from the knowledge of men and things they knew before, resurgent in sun and rain …