The girls were in an ambiguous but familiar position. If the elder brothers regarded them as things of naught, unable to throw a ball overarm or crack nuts with their teeth, yet in times of trouble the boys were eager to champion and comfort them and help them down to the last coin in their pockets. This meant that the girls, readily reduced to tears, were perpetual winners in the war between the sexes.
A singular characteristic of the boys was their insistence on games of which they invented or changed the rules, with the object of making them as difficult, and therefore as worthwhile, as possible. Any one of them who had a birthday was entitled to make his own rules, though these lasted only till the next morning. A game is a classic method of bringing life to order by giving it a fixed attainable objective, so that even if we lose, we are still in control. As time went on, the brothers would try to bring increasingly large areas—logic, ethics, poetry—into the same field as billiards or ludo—ludo, that is, under the Knox rules. Cheating was instantly detected. It was cheating to show fear, cheating to give up. A monstrous rule, superimposed on all the others by Dilly, was that “nothing is impossible”. But, inconveniently enough, the emotions are exempt from rules, and ignore their existence.
They were distinguished, even in a late-Victorian Evangelical household, by their truthfulness. Wilfred—with one possible exception, which will be discussed later—never told a lie at all. Ronnie told his last one in 1897, when he was nine. Social necessity would drive Eddie and Dilly to evasions, but they hated them. Honesty can scarcely, however, be counted a virtue in them; it was simply that they never felt the need for anything else.
Eddie was his mother’s favourite, and this was not resented by the other children, not even by the baby, for he was their favourite, too. Among a courageous group, he was the most daring. It was he who rode Doctor, he who climbed higher and higher, feeling that it would be a glorious death to plunge head-foremost through the tops of green trees, scattering the branches, he who fell off the jetty into deep water on holiday at Penzance. “It was a sad scene,” Winnie wrote, “as for some reason it was considered necessary for the whole party to return home … so out of the sea we were all bidden, five pairs of moist sandy cold feet stuffed into black stockings, five pairs of boots buttoned or laced on, and back the sad procession made its way.” “You’ll never live to be old, Mr Eddie,” threatened the nurse. But Eddie was not born predictable.
Eddie’s fall was known as The Accident. It was not thought that he took it seriously enough. It was known that one of Bishop French’s daughters, their Aunt Ethel, had died because she did not change her wet stockings after the monsoon. But the outing to Penzance, one of many seaside holidays, shows how anxious Edmund Knox was to give his children this new source of happiness and disaster which he had never known. George Knox, indeed, had never looked up a train in his life, but simply went down to the station and complained to the stationmaster if one was not ready for him. Edmund struggled valiantly with the difficulties of early starts and missed connections. As a result of one of these the family, with mountains of luggage, were stranded for hours at Bristol, and Eddie and Dilly seized the opportunity to study the master timetable in the office. Its complications appealed to their ingenious small boys’ minds, and Bradshaw’s Railway Guide joined Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome as a favourite recitation. As soon as humanly possible they taught it to their little brothers. At the age of three, Wilfred, when called upon to recite in company, could reel off the stations between Kibworth and Birmingham and the times of goods and cattle trains, adding
And wounded horses kicking,
And snorting purple foam:
Right well did such a couch befit
A Consular of Rome.
Life for the children at Kibworth was disturbed only when Bishop French came on leave, and impetuously swept his relatives together on holiday, wishing to see them all at once. “It was no small privilege to be his guest,” Edmund wrote, “and to hear him as he discoursed on Scripture, on the Fathers, or the antiquities we were to visit.” The children did not altogether agree. They were embarrassed by the old man’s habit of saying “a few seasonable words” to everyone they met, by his old-fashioned Rugby slang, mixed with phrases of classical Persian, and by his tendency to disappear entirely. On the day when they visited Lindisfarne it rained in torrents, and Edmund Knox thought it right to order a carriage, but “at the time of starting it was discovered that the Bishop had slipped away unnoticed. ” Some three or four miles onward they overtook him “in his shirt-sleeves, dripping wet, his coat over his arm, trudging gallantly onwards.” He had forgotten everything in his desire to be at the scene of the ministry of St Aidan. Worse still, he refused to calculate where, at the end of the day’s walk, they could get tea. The simple people of the country, he said, in the goodness of their hearts, would provide. This sometimes meant no tea at all. And yet it is something to have a saint in the family.
French resigned his bishopric, for reasons of ill-health, at the age of sixty-four. To the C.M.S. he was a “grand old campaigner” more in danger of going native than ever, a man who had friends among both Franciscans and Quakers, and who, during a recent tour of the Middle East, had shared an altar with a Chaldean priest. The Jansens still wondered whether unworldliness could not be carried too far, and were heartily thankful to hear of his retirement in 1889. Even French wondered “if perhaps my dear Lord and Master has no more need of me.” But in the following autumn, after much thought and prayer, he knew he must venture again. The Jansens were appalled to hear that he had been up to London to look at an exhibition of Stanley’s African medicine chest, so that he might choose the same brands himself. With little more than these and his book-bag, which he had carried himself over deserts and mountains and up the stairs at Kibworth Rectory, the old man set out in the November of 1890. He had no authority or backing. His destination was the whole Arab world, simply to tell them, even if no one accepted it, that Christ loved them and had died for them.
In this spirit he reached the holy city of Kairouan, where, dressed as a mullah in cloak, burnous and shawl, he sat down to teach at the outer gate of the Mosque. The Bishop of Jerusalem urged him, for his own safety, to move to Cairo. There he met a young missionary, Alexander Maitland, whom he had ordained himself, and who gave up everything to be with him and to accompany him to the Red Sea coast. They lived on dates and early oranges, and French took a quantity of Bibles in the folds of his burnous, to distribute where he could.
In February they reached Muscat, the capital of Oman, a little gap in a sea-wall of sheer rock, rising to six thousand feet. In that scorching climate, the Arabs say, the sword melts in the scabbard. The British India Company’s steamers called only once a fortnight. French and Maitland were not expected and knew nobody. The consul begged them to leave. They had to take refuge in two dirty rooms over a Portuguese grog-shop, and there they read and prayed together, and Maitland managed as best he could. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he wrote to Mrs French. “I was glad to wash plates for the Bishop.”
Maitland had the heavy responsibility of the old man, who disappeared, as he had done at Lindisfarne, without warning, to preach in the bazaar. Because of the danger of violence and stoning, he would not let his young friend accompany him there. After a month Maitland, who was consumptive, was overcome by the heat and had to go back to Cairo. The servant he had hired soon deserted, and French was left quite alone.
“As a villager told me the other day,” he wrote to his wife, “I am no Englishman but an Arab! I shall be in danger of becoming an alien, not to my own children I trust even then, and grandchildren. With a tanned and dyed skin, however, and added wrinkles, even Ethel and Eddie might fail to recognise grandpapa.… So Eddie has begun his schooldays! May they be days he will look back upon with happy thankfulness and joy hereafter …”
The ink dried, he added, before he could put pen to paper; he was living “like a sparrow on the housetops”. Occasionally he found a listen
er, who would stay for a reading of the gospel. He was trying to lay in a little store of biscuits “so as not to be at the mercy of the people I may be amongst”.
It was true that schooldays had started at Kibworth. While their sisters studied with a governess, and lay down every day on a blackboard to give them a good posture, Eddie and Dilly walked over to Mr Rogers’s school in the village. Eddie had begun on Kennedy’s Latin grammar; there were more inexplicable runes for Wilfred to repeat in the nursery: “Caesar adsum jam forte—Caesar had some jam for tea.”
Dilly was the mathematician, to the amazement of his father, who had not been able to make head or tail of the Merton College accounts. Dilly could not balance his accounts (twopence a week pocket-money) either, but he did not have to “do” sums, he “saw” them.
Meanwhile, the tender messages from their grandfather had ceased. No more letters came from Muscat. It was only later that they were able to follow his last wanderings, from Muttrah up the coast to Sib, from which place he hoped to journey into the interior. He had set out in a fishing-boat, under the blazing sun, with his book-bag. Agents of the Sultan, who deeply respected the strange old fakir, were deputed to keep watch over him, but they could do nothing when they found him insensible, still with a book in his hand. When they picked him up to bring him back to Muscat they found he weighed almost nothing. He died on 14 May; his body was prepared for burial by a group of Goanese Catholics, who had heard of him and his mission, although he did not know them.
“God had not left him the measure of strength he hoped to have,” Maitland wrote to Mrs Knox, “but that could only be proved by experience.” He arranged for the burial in the northernmost of the two coves of the Bay of Muscat, at the foot of the cliffs. It was wild and barren, but a kind of shrub with pink flowers grew there. He painted on the gravestone the words: He endured as seeing Him who is invisible. French’s biographer noted that “the grave is under the protection of a British gunboat, so there is little likelihood it will ever meet with neglect.”
At Kibworth the children were put into black clothes, and a new game—Caves in Arabia—was added to the nursery, played by any one of them who wanted to get away from the others. The effect on their mother of her father’s lonely death was profound. It led directly to an upheaval and to the end of their first happy period of childhood.
II
1891–1901
The Sterner Realities of Life
EDMUND KNOX HAD TAKEN ORDERS because he felt God called him to do so. But to enter the mid-Victorian Church meant both more and less than this. “The plain fact is,” his son Ronnie wrote, half a century later, “that while England led the world, and the Church of England was the expression of its national life, there was a monumental quality about the partnership which, do what you would, laid hold of the imagination. Anglicanism fitted into the landscape, was part of the body politic.”
To become one of its ministers was to join a legal establishment which influenced those who governed, to take responsibility for the souls of a great empire, and to make effective judgments in peace and war. That might mean a disputed loyalty. Knox, the scholarship boy whose education had cost one shilling, was a passionate supporter of free education, but a stout opponent of the government’s long-drawn-out attack on the Church schools. Again, when he became rector of Kibworth, it was assumed that, as a mild Tory, he would settle down comfortably in that heavy clay country and become a squire’s parson. But nothing of the kind happened.
Edmund’s heart sank when he saw the farm-labourers, in their smocks and tall hats, waiting outside the church so that “the quality” could go in first. He did not feel at ease with such a system, and longed for a wider scope, if not abroad, then in one of the great industrial cities. In 1891 he received from the Trustees of Aston-juxta-Birmingham (who were mostly Evangelicals) an offer of preferment. Aston was a huge, built-over, crowded industrial district, known to the world only through its football team, Aston Villa.
On a preliminary visit he found the vicarage, after making a number of inquiries, “in a dark and narrow street, set in a maze of smoke-begrimed small houses.” Edmund was more than doubtful about what the effect of the “air”, to which nineteenth-century doctors and patients attached so much importance, would be on his wife’s health. She had never quite recovered from the birth of Ronnie, when she had had a long and difficult labour. But Ellen was not afraid of the sulphur-laden air of Birmingham. She was her father’s daughter, and his last lonely mission had inspired her to do something, no matter how little, that would be worthy of him. She herself had never been to India, and had followed all his wanderings through his frequent letters to her. In the very last of them, written from Muscat two weeks before his death, he had congratulated them both on their resolution to take on the new difficult work. His only sorrow was that “I shall never be able again to offer to take a Sunday for you and set you free for needed rest.” “Your children will miss the beautiful lawn and the pleasant strolls in the country,” he added; “they have to enter on the sterner realities of life.”
If forty-two thousand souls of Birmingham’s workforce could live in the smoke and darkness of Aston parish, so, obviously enough, could their priest. Edmund threw himself into organization and visiting, Ellen into work for the schools—Sunday schools, reading classes for adults, and what were still called the Ragged Schools. They were full of confidence. When they left Kibworth a well-wisher, looking at Edmund’s solid form, had said: “Those shoulders are broad enough for anything.”
The six children had arrived at Aston with the girls in tears at parting with Doctor and at the sight of the tiny, soot-blackened garden. The boys, however, were stopped in their tracks by the sight of a new and instantly attractive form of transport, trams. “I was early fascinated by those gigantic steam-kettles in two sections, which used to ply between Aston and Birmingham,” Ronnie wrote. The cable past Snow Hill, where you could peer down a slit at the endless cable, gave the brothers the concept of perpetual motion. The trams were kings of the road; in Lancashire they were known as “cars”. Bicycles skidded on the lines, one breakdown held up the whole system, and old ladies were marooned in the middle of the street and had to be rescued. The years to come were never to bring any form of transport that they loved quite so well. They became trammers from that first day.
One advantage of Aston was the schools. By tram the girls could go to Edgbaston Ladies’ College, and Eddie and Dilly to day school. Edmund Knox did not like boarding schools, which he considered unnatural, and he wanted to undertake the family religious instruction himself, at home. Here a certain unevenness of response had already appeared. The girls were devout, so were the little boys, Ronnie in particular; dressed in Ethel’s pinafore for a surplice, he conducted the funerals of pet birds in the grimy flower-beds. On Eddie, as he put it himself, “Church did not seem to rub off properly,” though he conformed for his mother’s sake. Dilly held his counsel.
Leaving the question of doctrine aside, all the instruction they received from their parents was positive and humanitarian—not so, however, the grim warnings of Nurse and Cook, whose villain was that horror-figure, the Pope, “always laying snares,” Winnie remembered, “in far-off Italy to entrap our nursery in especial, and in general, into the evil lures of his superstition.” Old Nurse said she could smell a Papist a mile off, and was much preoccupied with the imminence of the Last Trump, which she hoped might come when they were all at prayer, and if possible in clean underclothes. But the children were born with the power of discrimination. Even the girls were able to discount Old Nurse, and “in such homes as ours,” Winnie thought, “we surely experienced something of the clear light crystal world of the earlier ages of Faith.”
The vast parish was responding well, and Aston was now divided into seven districts, with willing helpers in each of them. But a few days after Christmas 1891, in the thick of the Christmas work, Ellen Knox caught influenza. She did not seem to be able to pick up. For the next eig
ht months she had to be sent to one nursing home after another, the last one being at Brighton, “for the air”. Aunt Emily, Edmund’s kind, but harassed and ineffective, sister, came to keep house. She had no imagination, was not used to children, and had no idea what to do. There was an atmosphere, so frightening to children, of things not being quite right, and of discussions behind closed doors. The news from Brighton was worse. They were sent for, and although on this occasion their mother recovered, they never forgot that Aunt Emily had refused to let them travel, because it was Sunday. The immediate danger was said to have passed. Then, at the end of August a letter came from their father, addressed to all of them: “My dear, dear children.” Their mother had died that morning.
The blow to Eddie was such that in the course of a very long life, he, like his grandfather before him, never quite recovered from it. It gave him, at twelve years old, a spartan endurance and a determination not to risk himself too easily to life’s blows, which might, at times, have been mistaken for coldness.
For a year he remained alone at Aston with his father and Aunt Emily, while the others were distributed among relations. Edmund Knox could find relief from his misery only by working all day and half the night, so that the small boy was intensely lonely. He was old enough now to go to King Edward’s School; during the long miserable evenings he went up by himself to the box room and comforted himself by devising his own tramway system. It had to be horse-drawn, because he could not think how to represent the steam engines.
The Knox Brothers Page 4