“Well, they have him now, and they will make no sparing use of him,” Bishop Knox wrote gloomily to Winnie. Rome had taken from him his dearest pledge. In the closing chapters of his memoirs, he tried to sum up the loss and gain.
I have not succeeded, as my father succeeded, in bringing my children up entirely in their father’s faith, and for this I take no small share of the blame, so far as it is blame, to myself …
When Ronald was quite a small boy at school one of his masters challenged the class with the words: ‘—can any of you finish that line?’ Ronald instantly replied: ‘— —It is our boast that we are far ahead of our parents.’
These words seem to me to embody, at once, the effects of a Public School education, the spirit and temper of the age in which my children grew up, and the exceptional vivacity of their character. They were determined to be better than their parents had been, and to do better than their parents had done, and to live in the spirit of the restless first decades of the twentieth century. Who shall say that this ambition was in itself wrong or unnatural? That it led some of them in directions often very costly to those whom they loved and who loved them, cannot be denied, and here I find the saddest of the experiences and remembrances of my life, records of the most humiliating of my failures. Against these I set the treasure of the full and over-flowing measure of my children’s love, surpassing all that I deserve.
Eddie was not demobilized until April 1919. Even that was relatively early, since the date of demobilization depended on the length of war service and the number of wounds. He was signed off with his gratuity at the Crystal Palace, the last military command which he received being “Mind the step”. Meanwhile he had acquired the lease, or so he thought, of another little Hampstead house, this time in East Heath Road; but it turned out to be mysteriously inhabited by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, whose comment was: “Portland Villas! It sounds like one of those houses where a few guests are taken, mental not objected to.” Meanwhile, Eddie and Christina, with the two infants, were homeless in an overcrowded London. It might, he thought, be easier to live, with their few possessions, in a furniture van, with horses and auxiliary steam, and pull up outside any likely property until it fell vacant.
He had begun to contribute again to Punch in 1918, but a regular job was absolutely necessary. It was simply to support his family that he worked for eighteen months at the Ministry of Labour, where, he said:
We were supposed to be discovering appointments for ex-officers, but were chiefly, I think, trying to find appointments for ourselves … The first duty of a civil servant, I gathered, was to decide at what date he would take his holidays, the second to decide at what time he would have his tea … I also, rather hastily, asked for a doughnut at teatime, but soon got tired of them. But at the same time I felt, perhaps owing to my army training, an overwhelming inability to alter any regulation once made, and I think the man who was employed to bring them felt the same. So I put the doughnuts in a drawer. When I left the Ministry, I had a whole drawerful of doughnuts, and I have often wondered what the officer who succeeded me did with them.
What were the other possibilities? Little else was discussed by his old Army friends. One of them, who had bought a small grocery in Nottingham, wrote:
You had better start something like this, it pays and is alright when one gets over the shop part, but I am lucky in that I supply all the ‘knuts’ of the city, and know most of them as an ex-officer. I must say it strikes me as Comic sometimes, when I am at one of their Houses and suddenly think that I gave my hostess a pound of Marg at is 2d in the morning wrapped up in a paper bag.
Eddie, he said, would be most welcome as a partner if he would care to become a “Practical Dairy Farmer”. But the prospect seemed daunting, though less so than the Civil Service. Eddie was now in and out of the Punch offices, helping with unimportant routine jobs, and hoping, in time, for an assistant editorship. In a reckless moment, he handed in his notice to the Ministry. Meanwhile the family could not continue in lodgings. Christina thought they might try living in the country.
VI
1919–1929
The Twenties
AT THE END OF THE GREAT WAR, Eddie was thirty-seven, Dilly thirty-five, Wilfred thirty-two and Ronnie thirty. The new decade, the 1920s, accepted them as a natural phenomenon. In 1922, in the Michaelmas term, the Cambridge Union organized a debate, at which all four brothers were to speak. The motion proposed was “That This House Believes That the Whole World Over, There’s No Place Like Home.” Eddie and Wilfred were to speak in favour, Dilly and Ronnie against. “Ronnie was usually the best speaker,” Winnie considered. “Dillwyn was hesitant, Wilfred was more appealing than Ronnie, who laid down the law too much, Eddie was an awful speaker, so brilliant, but hated it and was too nervous to be heard.” But the upshot of the debate will never be known. On the appointed afternoon a thick yellow fog descended over London and made it impossible for any of them to get to the station.
After the Great WAR, the money left by the Bishop’s first wife (Ellen French) was divided between the children; it was apparently a provision of the will that the youngest child should have turned thirty. The history of this legacy was as follows. Wealthy old Mr Jansen, Ellen’s grandfather, had adopted two nieces and had two daughters of his own; to each of them he left £160,000. In the French family (Bishop French, of course, did not touch a penny of it) it was divided between eight children, and after that between six Knoxes, who received about £3,000 each, mostly in railway shares—“an excellent example,” Winnie said, “of how to get rid of inherited money without spending it.”
Bishop Knox retired in 1921, handing over his see to William Temple. The diocese, in gratitude for his many years of devoted work, had already presented him with a majestic Daimler “whose machinery seldom failed to work,” and with his portrait, to be painted by the Academician of his choice. In any artistic matters the Bishop was quite at a loss; he tramped wearily round the Academy until rescued by one of Mrs K.’s sisters; she chose the artist A. T. Nowell, who produced a delightful portrait, in which the Bishop is apparently about to rise from his seat and knock somebody down with a Bible. Finally the diocese subscribed to buy him a house for his retirement, and Mrs K. supervised their last move, to 18 Beckenham Grove, Shortlands, in Kent.
The house needed repair, but very soon acquired the true deep leathery fragrance of a Victorian rectory. Huge roses and cabbages appeared in the garden; all the strange heavy old implements were back in the kitchen, things for ironing clerical collars, opening oysters, sharpening steel knives; Alice and Richmond, whose ages nobody liked to ask any more, still presided there, grumbling tenaciously; Ethel was installed in her room with her typewriter and her work for the Christian Missionary Society, all the letters she had ever received, all the old toys, all the old books; when the four sons came to visit, they became, as soon as they passed through the stained-glass front door, the “dear boys” once again. Indeed, the two priests, Wilfred and Ronald, became Iffie and Whooks.
It must not be thought, by the way, that Ethel, who had now become Aunt Ethel to three nephews and a niece, was at all discontented with her lot. Her Victorianism was not of the kind that appeared in twentieth-century novels. She did not like the outside world, and was proud to stay at home. Her bits of jewellery were put away for “the Miss Knox of the next generation”. When her niece married, she put them away with a sigh, because now there would be no Miss Knox.
The Bishop settled down immediately to write a further refutation of the Tractarians, and to prepare the opposition to the threatened changes in the Prayer Book. “It is an anxious time,” he told Winnie, “the Press are concentrating on the wrong points. I even wrote a letter to the Scotsman to try to head them off, but it was not printed—perhaps they did not recognise E. A. Knox, Bishop, any more than Dobie & Co [the grocers], who send in my accounts addressed to K. Bishop Esq.” But, even in retirement, he was formidable. “Peg away,” he wrote, putting al
l his scholarship at the disposal of the Parliamentary opposition. In 1928, when the Commons rejected the Prayer Book, he was warmly congratulated: “The general-ship of the octogenarian has resulted in a great victory. To you, more than to any man, this decision is due.”
In appearance, the Bishop had grown increasingly stout, and his wheezing presence in the study was perhaps more alarming than he knew. Mrs K., however, now silver-haired, was as elegant as ever. Still exceedingly busy, and always with Ethel to care for, she never seemed in the least hurry. At teatime she presided with a small kettle boiling over a spirit lamp, so that a little hot water could be poured to warm each cup before the tea was put in. At her elbow there was a “curate’s friend”, that is, a bamboo framework holding four plates so that the curate need not go round the drawing room offering each cake separately; on a table there was always a book of French poetry or memoirs, with an ivory knife to cut the pages.
At the end of the 1920s Mrs K. was persuaded to write an article for the Daily Chronicle in a series entitled “Mothering Famous Men”. In this she recalled the Birmingham schoolroom days, but at once a discrepancy appeared; while Eddie, as Evoe, and Ronnie had become more and more well known, Dilly and Wilfred were less and less so, particularly Dilly, behind the closed doors of Room 40. The features editor printed pictures only of Mrs K. herself and of Ronnie (“a most accommodating friendly child”) and Eddie (“a sensitive nature behind a coating of reserve”), both guileless in their Eton collars. Dilly had to be described simply as “a classical scholar”, and Wilfred as “an Anglo-Catholic priest”.
Wilfred had been expected to “go over” when Ronnie went, but there was never any question of his doing so. In 1917 his vicar at Graham Street, who was also his confessor, J. C. Howell, died after an operation; then in the following autumn, after the loss of so many friends on the Western front, came the spiritual loss of Ronnie. Wilfred, always independent, had been driven into himself. As soon as the war was over, he staked all his hopes for his Church on one pamphlet, printed in 1918 by the Society of St Peter and St Paul: At a Great Price Obtained I This Freedom.
They were the words of the garrison commander in Jerusalem to St Paul, who had claimed consideration as a Roman citizen. Paul’s reply was, “But I was free born.” How could the Church earn the right to be called free-born again? And what had gone wrong with the Church of England anyway? Wilfred’s answer was painfully direct. “The poor object to the church, because it is rich. There is a general feeling that the church is a church of the rich, governed by the rich for the rich. The feeling is largely inarticulate, but it is widely and deeply felt.” All Anglo-Catholics should lead the way by demanding an absolute separation of Church and State, and they should be prepared to pay the price, that is, to give up all the money and patronage derived from the State. Priests must live on what they earn. A hundred a year would, he thought, be a fair living wage for a priest. A priest shouldn’t want a living wage, which meant “bringing up a family in the style customary among the upper middle classes. I cannot find among Our Lord’s charges to his disciples that they should live in the style customary to the upper middle classes.” Bishops, perhaps, might have five hundred pounds a year. “Their palaces could go, or be used as diocesan seminaries, a far better use than the present one.” Church buildings, or some of them, could stay, because they would be genuinely needed if the clergy were poor and gave up all idea of social status, “an absolutely unmixed advantage, since it will teach England to respect a priest as the representative of God, not as a gentleman from Oxford. Then we can follow the carpenter of Nazareth, and rid ourselves of the unholy alliance of the Church with middle-class respectability that has led to the deadness of English religion.”
If Wilfred could have had Ronnie still standing by him, what might they not have done? As things turned out, the question of corporate reunion with Rome was obsessive, and occupied nearly all the time of the successive Anglo-Catholic conferences. Although Wilfred himself became a leading Anglo-Catholic apologist and historian, he was intensely disappointed by the failure to respond to At a Great Price. He had written it with the urgency, not of inexperience, but of something that had been long held back and desperately needed saying. Christ was concerned with the condition of human beings as He found them on this earth, and took every kind of risk to show this. Couldn’t the Church of England take the one risky step, the first one, of ceasing to be respectable? Whatever support Wilfred expected, it did not come.
But his loneliness found its own relief. Ronald was at heart family-loving and domestic, Wilfred community-loving and sociable. In 1920 he was introduced to a community, the only one, perhaps, in which he could ever have felt truly at home. It had the odd distinction that the same thing could be said of nearly all its members.
The Oratory of the Good Shepherd was not, and is not, in fact a community at all, nor is it a guild, nor an order, nor could it have been in origin anything but English. The vagueness of its definition, and the absolute certainty of its members as to what they are, makes it one of the many unseen and unknown currents that quietly deepen the life surrounding it.
It is a religious brotherhood of unmarried priests and laymen which gives its members the help (not the compulsion) of a close fellowship and a common rule. This help extends to both daily work and the spiritual life, or, perhaps, makes them the same thing. There is a Superior and a Chapter General which meets every year, but some members live in communities, some are scattered from end to end of the world. For these, meetings are rare, and letters must keep them in touch. At the fixed hours of prayer, wherever they may be, they know and feel themselves together. For prayer, stillness is necessary, and this is difficult, because busy activity seems more rewarding. Stillness, however, does not mean inactivity, but peace.
The Oratory “grew”, or “originated”, like any natural form of life, in Cambridge just before the Great War, but it was very characteristic that two of the founding members, Father Waggett and H. L. Pass, a layman from St John’s, were such individualists that they could not get on and worked from houses at opposite ends of the town. After the war, when the O.G.S. expanded, they expressed their ideal somewhat more formally. They recognized that they were in a world “hostile to Christianity and sick of old watchwords,” which had nevertheless shown the apparently boundless extent of human courage and self-sacrifice, even when all confidence in the Higher Command had gone. Sacrifice, in the name of Christ, has remained the keynote of the Oratory, whose duty is unselfish action, loyalty and love. “They shall be absolutely forbidden to speak ill of other bodies of Christians.” There were to be none of the “quick or harsh judgements that harden differences” on anything or anybody, and this charity would be hard to put into practice, because other people are not only infuriating, but boring. The O.G.S. faced this from the beginning. “It is fortunate for us that loving and liking are not the same thing. We are not called upon to like our neighbour, but to love him.” This comment, by one of the Superiors, George Tibbatts, shows how practical unworldliness can be.
Self-sacrifice is a matter of organized will. If possible, those living in a group should share their earnings. Certainly, every member is called upon to make sure, at the end of every month, that he has spent as little as possible on himself, and, furthermore, that he is not pleased with himself for having done so. Each Brother may ask for six weeks a year free board and lodging with any other. Before any decision, from accepting a new appointment to buying a new typewriter, one should (but does not have to) consult the other members as to the right course to take; one should (but does not have to) accept their advice. The Oratory gives up, in a sense, less than the other orders, but each individual has the entire responsibility of self-discipline, “and being quite unknown we have not the judgement of the world outside to control us.” But they have the great comfort of belonging to an understanding community.
A distinctive duty of the O.G.S. is the “labour of the mind”, a special duty of thought and study
, to meet the questions of the twentieth century. Every Brother has his own private rule of writing and reading and of not sinking back into a doze or “glancing” at the newspapers. The “labour” takes many different forms; Eric Milner-White, for instance, one of the earliest members, was a fine musician who arranged for King’s College Chapel the much-loved Festival of Nine Carols and Lessons. But each member must be sure that no question put to him by an unbeliever is too difficult for him to try to answer it, and he must do this, too, without “embarrassing holiness”.
In scholarship, the Oratory is to avoid jealousy of those who are quicker, impatience with those who are slower; in doctrine, to remember that intolerance usually turns out to be the worship of ourselves; in worship, to avoid above all things “the impression of the Conservative Party at prayer.” The recognizable note of the Oratory is joy, not to be confused with heartiness. Joy is simply evidence of the love of God. “And after all, what else is there in the world that matters? To love and be loved—it is all contained in this.”
The membership of the O.G.S., always small, is growing yearly and has spread to Africa, India, Australasia and the United States; its centre is no longer a University; like Keynesian economics, like the assumptions of Bloomsbury, like the atomic research programme, it radiated outward from Cambridge, and left it behind. Those who wish to become members have a probationary period of from one to three years; as always, they are free to leave whenever they like. It is a community that is rarely talked about, and never talks about itself.
It would be absurd to suggest that there were no difficulties at the Oratory, or that it completely reproduced the spirit of the household of Little Gidding, which had partly inspired it. The majority of the Brothers were brilliant and eccentric, and eccentricity, by definition, leads to divergency. There were differences, though these, in the spirit of the place, were charitably settled; each of the members modestly considered himself very ordinary, while the others, when you came to think about it, were odd.
The Knox Brothers Page 18