The Knox Brothers

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  There was a large kitchen table in the box-room [Eddie wrote]; I cut the tramlines with a penknife and burnt them out to make them deeper with a knitting needle heated on a candle. The system was fairly accurate and I bought some little tin engines and Stöllwerk chocolate horses to pull them. These were very cheap, and lasted till they melted. The grown-ups found out, of course; they didn’t punish me, nor did they praise my industry.

  Winnie, Ethel and Dilly were packed off to Eastbourne. Their broken-hearted father hardly knew which way to turn, and was prepared to accept any reasonable offer. The relative at Eastbourne was a widowed great-aunt, a sister of George Knox’s, who made it clear that by offering them a home (she was in fact being paid for their board and lodging) she was exceeding herself in Christian charity. Her Protestantism was of the “black” variety. When Dilly, shy and unmanageable, was told to kneel down and “give himself to Jesus” he took refuge in the coal hole. He had to go to an uncongenial preparatory school where he too rapidly learned all that they could teach him, and he was suffering the frustration of a natural athlete—there was no one at school who could play his spin bowling—and what sort of practice can you get in a coal hole? His sister describes him at this time as “brusque and cutting beyond endurance to the uppish or conceited, but kind beyond belief in one’s troubles.” Therefore although Dilly, like Eddie, had made a promise to himself not to care too much about anyone or anything again, he was obliged to break it every time the girls cried, or were given arithmetic homework.

  The little boys, Wilfred and Ronnie, were far more fortunate. They were sent to their father’s younger brother, Uncle Lindsey, the vicar of Edmundthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire. It was a small country parish where life went by placidly, and on Sundays even the old horses in the fields knew what day it was and did not come down to the gate to be harnessed. The grandmother, Frances Knox, now widowed, occupied one of the rooms, and was so much respected that when she drove out, still in her Quaker cap and shawls, the whole village stood at their doors to see her. She was able to give a good deal of discreet financial help to the family (it was she who had paid for the Knox children’s seaside holidays) and “did much good”, as the saying went, locally. Three of the unmarried daughters also lived at the vicarage, and Lindsey, who had never married either, had very little say in the household. He lived a life of untroubled contentment. The ladies gave all the orders and told him what to say and do; sometimes he would forget, and wander off into the fields, returning with a hatful of mushrooms. This absent-mindedness was in part a self-protection, perhaps, but Uncle Lindsey had no grievances. He cared deeply for the welfare of his little flock. When a visitor’s carriage was ready to drive away he would emerge tremblingly on the front steps and cry: “Beware! Beware the parting pot!” The Parting Pot was, as it turned out, a public house at the crossroads from which his parishioners often came out in a confused condition and in danger of being run over. Farther than this ten-mile distance he rarely ventured. Some things which he saw in the newspapers he could hardly believe, and he put them out of his mind, which had room only for belief.

  When Wilfred and Ronnie arrived they were told to pay particular respect to the stationmaster, because he had refused to put up Liberal posters during the election of 1886. “Conservative” was far too weak a word to describe the politics of Uncle Lindsey and the Aunts. Their lack of understanding of industrial and social problems was absolute.

  On the other hand, they were most successful as hosts to young children, perhaps because they had never left childhood behind. The atmosphere at Edmundthorpe was quite unlike Waddon or even Kibworth; it was a sweet and primitive Evangelicalism, where Christ was felt as “the unseen guest” at every meal, and to be distressed if your umbrella was missing was “a sin of angry thought”. When Ronnie won fivepence at ludo—which, in a sense, was gaming—he felt it was tainted money, and put it in the collection. There were no harsh words; the motive power was always love. And Uncle Lindsey, like Mr Dick, had quite definite ideas as to what to do with a small boy, if one came his way: amuse it; wash it; feed it. With their uncle they collected honey, made bonfires of autumn leaves and jumped over them, and slid on the ice in winter. He also conceived the idea of starting their education, and crammed into his small nephews, aged six and four, an amazing quantity of Latin and Greek. He saw no difficulty in this, and in fact there was none. Ronnie was an exceedingly bright little boy, and Wilfred, who in some ways had the better brain of the two, was gifted with an exceptional memory. He could read through the Times leader once, shut his eyes, and repeat it word for word.

  Ronnie accepted the régime in a less critical spirit than Wilfred, who had a sharper temper than his brother. But both of them were happy, and, above all, happy with each other. They shared all their games, all their confidences, and grew up, Winnie thought, “in absolute dependence on each other”. It was an alliance against fate, which, it seemed, Time would never have power to break.

  It was during the four years at Edmundthorpe that Wilfred told, or rather implied, his only lie. While Ronnie and he were ambushing each other in the garden they had the bad luck to break off a branch of the flowering Judas tree. Wilfred dared not confess—not for fear of punishment, for there was none at Edmundthorpe, but because the Aunts were so fond of the tree. By bedtime he had still said nothing, and that night there was a storm, which scattered twigs and branches everywhere. All the damage was put down to the wind, but Wilfred’s conscience ached.

  During the school holidays the children all went back to Aston for a noisy reunion. Different backgrounds had made them adjust differently, and they quarrelled, but at the approach of authority, all made an impenetrable common front together. Eddie and Dilly were particularly glad to see each other—“I can’t think what I’m going to do without you, you lazy hound,” Eddie wrote to Eastbourne—and disagreed particularly fiercely. Their father, coming home to uproar, was driven distracted. “It was specially painful to me,” he recalled, “to feel increasingly as each holiday came round the bereavement that I had sustained.” The doctor suggested a visit to the seaside, even if it could only be a shadow of their happiness at Penzance.

  Aunt Emily, protesting feebly, embarked with them to Bridlington. They immediately escaped from her care, rushed down to the sea (which the doctor had forbidden), and for the first time in their lives saw a theatre, or rather a nigger minstrels’ fit-up, where Uncle Sam was clacking the bones, and inviting the audience to join in singing

  Can’t get away

  To marry yer today—

  My wife won’t let me!

  When their father arrived he could hardly credit the vulgar gaiety, so different is the measure of heartbreak in adults and children. He hastily inaugurated new amusements—cricket on the sands, as far as possible from Uncle Sam, and expeditions to neighbouring churches. The next year Aunt Emily’s nerves and health failed, and he had to take them himself to the Isle of Man. “But of course,” he wrote, “it was evident that while I might be able to manage a parish, I was a poor hand at controlling the high spirits and caring for the costumes and manners of so charming and irresponsible a party. ‘Garters’ I remember as a special trial. They were always missing!”

  Although Knox’s pastoral work flourished, the rectory at Aston grew more seedy and neglected with every passing month. The furniture was engrained with soot, the drawing room shut up, the cupboards full of mislaid or broken articles. The boys were beginning to resemble savages, speaking Latin and Greek. There was no help for it, the home would have to be broken up. At this point the Bishop of Worcester, Perowne, an old friend of Bishop French, sent for Knox and offered him a new appointment—the parish of St Philip’s, Birmingham, with the post of Bishop Suffragan of Coventry.

  It would be a considerable responsibility—another vast district, a diocese with only one minister to every five thousand of the population. In his own words, “it became evident that I must marry again.” The whole rich supporting background
of Victorian churchgoing—the parish workers, the lay readers, the churchwardens, the Gospel Temperance meetings, the missions, the men’s Bible classes—everyone, up to the Bishop himself, knew that Knox could not go on without a wife.

  She would have to be vicarage born and bred, or she could hardly face the huge city diocese, administered from Coventry, as Knox knew, “by the most charming of old-fashioned clergy, whose interest in Birmingham was, to say the best, tepid.” All the work and duty would be his. As a husband, he was now a man of forty-seven, growing bald and very stout, his natural geniality under a cloud, barely solvent as a result of his many charities and building activities, and chronically overworked. He would never marry without love and respect, and that meant respect, also, for his uncouth children. Many, however, were undaunted. Out of the unmarried lady church workers of Aston, few would have refused the new Suffragan Bishop. Here was another difficulty. From this aspect, Edmund Knox was in need of rescue.

  Through Bishop Perowne, he was invited several times to meet Canon Newton, the Vicar of Redditch—a kind of vicar quite outside Knox’s experience, because he had inherited an absurdly large sum of money and had not given it away, but lived in comfort, even luxury. Horace Newton went deer-stalking every year on his own moor in the West Highlands, travelling from Glasgow on his own steam-yacht; he built a vast holiday mansion there, Glencrippsdale, and, since the vicarage was much too small for him, another one at Redditch. This house, Holmwood, had been designed for him by Temple Moore at the beginning of his career as an architect.

  At Holmwood there was ample room for his six daughters and his long-wished-for son, and the handsome family moved like the Shining Ones in this appropriate setting. In Scotland the girls rode and fished, but always gallantly and high-heartedly, enjoying risk, but not taking it seriously. As vicar’s daughters, and sincere Christians, they undertook the parish duties, but admitted frankly that they found them very boring. They remained serene, never pretending. They had style.

  The eldest of them, Ethel Mary, was a graceful and handsome young woman with blue eyes, an airily penetrating blue gaze before which affectation collapsed. Her uncle, Richard Wilton, a minor Victorian poet, wrote a sonnet on her photograph:

  Since through the open window of the eye

  The unconscious secret of the soul we trace

  And character is written on the face,

  In this sun-picture what do we descry? …

  Courage, certainly. Wilton also refers to “the gentle current of thy days”, but this was soon to be interrupted.

  In 1894 Ethel was twenty-seven, with many admirers, one of them a wealthy cousin. She could certainly have “looked above” Edmund Knox. This was in spite of the fact that Canon Newton settled no money at all on his daughters when they married. Why should he? His own wife, their mother, had been penniless, and they were perfectly happy. He did not give the girls any formal education either. They were taught music and languages, spoke French, and picked up the rest of their knowledge from the books in the library. Ethel had learned classical Greek, but simply because she wanted to.

  Was it possible that she would consider marriage with Edmund? Not much less romantic than the day when he bought the rose on the station platform, he decided that if Ethel accepted an invitation to his consecration at St Paul’s Cathedral, that would mean that she had given him encouragement to hope. “It proved,” he wrote, “that I was right, to my own unspeakable gain.”

  But would it be a gain for Ethel? She had not yet met the children, to whom, after all, she must be stepmother. Determined to risk everything, Edmund Knox arranged to bring the whole lot of them to Holmwood for the New Year of 1895.

  The Newtons, meeting them at the station, gave no sign of dismay, for that would have been unkind, and they were never unkind. The Knox children looked like scarecrows, or remnants from a jumble sale, the girls in all-purpose black frocks, two sizes too large to allow for growth, Ronnie and Wilfred in grotesque black suits, handsewn by their grandmother’s maid at Edmundthorpe. The six of them clung together awkwardly, too shy to find the right words. They had known them at Kibworth, but had forgotten them since. For their part, they stared almost in disbelief at the house to which they had been brought. Holmwood was in the highest style of the Arts and Crafts movement, with stone-framed lattice windows and steep slate roofs, the haunt of doves in summer, now deep in snow. Once inside the white-painted hall they saw shining floors, Gimson furniture, Morris chintzes, and a staircase sweeping upward to the glass dome of the house. A blazing wood fire drew out the scent of hothouse plants. And where did the light come from? None of the children had ever seen electric light in a house before. When Wilfred and Ronnie were put to bed they sat in their nightgowns, taking strict turns, as they always did, to turn it on and off, and nobody told them to stop.

  At dinnertime, under the glowing lights, the Newton girls wore Liberty gowns of velveteen; they were beautiful, the house was beautiful—in the boys’ terms, “awfully jolly”. Faced unequivocally with beauty, the older children recognized at last a starvation they had never known by name. It was strange territory. They felt humiliated most of all when, as they usually did at home, they began to quarrel, punching and pulling each other’s hair to emphasize their points. The Newtons said nothing in reproach, they simply went away; no one ever quarrelled, or even raised their voices, at Holmwood.

  “It never occurred to me,” Winnie wrote, “for we had no idea why this treat had come our way, that upstairs slender forms in satin dressing-gowns were slipping in and out of their charming bedrooms to murmur to my future stepmother: ‘Ethel, darling, you can’t possibly face that family.’ But luckily for us expostulations were useless.” Ethel would never have given Edmund Knox encouragement if she had not intended to carry off everything in her stride. She wanted to do this, just as she had wanted to learn Greek. The family never let her forget the entry she made in her diary on her wedding day. Finished the Antigone. Married Bip.

  All that could be done in the way of improvement she did, rapidly and tactfully. Her first task was the decoration of St Philip’s Rectory, a good large house in the very centre of Birmingham, but with no garden, only a small backyard. This was a further restriction for the children, and a real sacrifice to the Bishop, an expert gardener. As to the rooms, St Philip’s would never be much like Holmwood, but it could be painted white, and hung with Morris’s Blackthorn chintz, and good pieces of furniture could be recovered from the shambles at Aston; she added things of her own, china, silver, watercolours, poetry books, French literature. Some of the Knox possessions she never managed to get rid of, the Indian bedspread, for example, brought back by Mrs French, embroidered with tigers in gold thread with looking-glass eyes, and a steel engraving of “ God’s Eye Shut Upon the Heart of the Sinner”, which she finally banished to the lavatory. All the Newtons’ prophecies were falsified. The home was reestablished and the whole family reunited. In the evening Ethel coaxed her dreaded charges into the drawing room and read aloud to them—Stevenson’s Will o’ the Mill and The Wrong Box, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes—undisturbed by the boys who were winding up their clockwork engines behind the sofa. To them it was keenly interesting that one of the main railway lines ran into the station from a tunnel actually underneath the house. Very well, their stepmother accepted this, just as, to begin with, she accepted everything, except the annual seaside lodgings; instead of these, she hired vacant rectories, in different parts of England and Wales, for their summer holidays. Here she adapted gallantly to the demand for high teas and to long cricket matches, during which Dilly was not allowed to make more than a hundred and fifty runs, and little Ronnie, quite ignoring the game, picked bunches of wild flowers in the deep field and brought them, as an admiring tribute, to his new mother.

  The little ones, naturally, were the first to be won over and the most dear to her; the girls had begun to turn to her from the first evening at Holmwood. The older boys, Eddie in particular, were a challenge. She sa
w that the trouble lay partly in names, and told them to call her Mrs K. But a slight barrier remained. She was reluctant, for example, to discuss health matters, her own or anyone else’s. Eddie’s nervous indigestion was dismissed as “the gulps”. He could not quite lower his defences, even when she took him to Glencrippsdale, and taught him to fish.

  The civilizing process had to be gradual. In the main, it was assumed in those days that it was sufficient amusement for brothers and sisters simply to be together. So, indeed, it was. But Mrs K. would look into the schoolroom and note that all was well, the girls banging out a duet on the piano, the little boys quietly playing, Eddie and Dilly sarcastically reading to each other out of Smiles’s Self-Help, then be summoned urgently a few minutes later to find Self-Help sailing out of the window, Eddie and Dilly locked in a death grapple, Wilfred and Ronnie cowering in corners with their hands folded over their bellies to protect their most valuable possession, their wind. At other times the boys disappeared completely for long periods to avoid being made to “pay calls”.

  On the subject of education—perhaps because her own had been so casual, partly perhaps because of the maniacal scenes in the schoolroom—Mrs K. stood firm. The boys must go to boarding schools. Their father was still doubtful and would have liked to keep them at home, but was induced to agree. Of course, they would have to win scholarships or the fees could not be met, and it would be a mistake for those nearest in age to compete with each other, so Eddie and Wilfred were entered for Rugby, and Dilly and Ronnie for Eton.

  Meantime, Eddie was sent to a distant preparatory school, Locker’s Park, in Hemel Hempstead; Dilly went, at the age of eleven, to Summer Fields (then still called Summer Field), near Oxford. Mrs McLaren, the formidable manager, was, it appears, unwilling to admit him at such a late age, for she liked to catch them young, but changed her tune when she heard that Ronnie, already reading Virgil at the age of six, would soon be joining him. Dilly needed only a year’s coaching to take his Eton scholarship. As for Ronnie, the little boy who had been asked at four years old what he liked doing and had replied, “I think all day, and at night I think about the past,” was already a natural philosopher. He made a docile and friendly pupil, saved from any temptation to vanity by his relentless elder brothers.