Wilfred himself, even as early as the 1920s, was certainly unusual in manner. His transparent honesty could give offence. If he was busy, and was asked if it was convenient for him to spare a moment, he simply answered “no.” If he forgot an engagement, the best he could do by way of apology was to say, “I didn’t come to dinner with you yesterday.” Some of those who were attracted or interested by the O.G.S., without necessarily intending to join it, found him, at first encounter, puzzling. Malcolm Muggeridge recalls that he was greeted with an almost unintelligible remark out of the side of the mouth, followed by a number of disjointed sentences. Could they connect? Well, that was the fascination. There was just a chance that if you stayed long enough, they might. Canon Jack Bagley, who did become a member, first arrived when Wilfred was gardening and had a hoe and a spade flung at him, with a command to “Get on with it.” Others, falling over a wheelbarrow, were sternly disregarded, or were suddenly left alone at ten o’clock, the retiring hour, without explanation.
In 1920 the O.G.S. had acquired a building in Lady Margaret Road which became Oratory House; the members, Wilfred included, sold out their shares to meet the freehold price. It was an unbeautiful, inconvenient, poorly lit red-brick building, with very cold passages and a tangled garden. Here Wilfred came to live when his novitiate was completed, in the summer of 1921, with the Warden and six undergraduates. One of them, Fred Brittain of Jesus, has left a description of the routine. There was a married couple to do the cooking, but the residents cleaned their own rooms and waited at table; most men in those days had very little idea how to do this, and still less how to manage the cooks; one couple was found dead drunk in the pantry. Breakfast was taken in complete silence, which seemed irritating at first, afterwards helpful; the centre of the whole day was the time of meditation and prayer.
Another early lay member was Joseph Needham, later Master of Caius and the great historian of Chinese science. The openminded discussions at the Oratory, he has said, showed him “the great need for a re-thinking of Christian doctrine and practice in the light of scientific knowledge, for example, in the attitude to sexual questions, race relations and social justice.” He noticed neither the cold nor the irregular cooking. Wilfred Knox “was one of the people from whom I learned most in my youth from personal experience and contact; a demonstration of how to combine a deep attachment to devotional and liturgical traditions with a totally liberated and fearless search for truth.”
Wilfred was most certainly deeply attached to the liturgy, without, however, being able to sing one note of music correctly. For tone-deafness there was not much to choose between him and Ronnie; on the eve of his ordination as deacon Ronnie had gone down to the bottom of the drive at St Edmund’s to practise singing the Ite, missa est; “I did think I could cause no annoyance to anybody there, but every rook in Hertfordshire rose shrieking in protest.” At the Oratory, Fred Brittain acted as Wilfred’s Vicar Choral, and describes him as joining in the carefully arranged service “like a bull-frog”. Brittain still regarded him with qualified amazement.
Wilfred Knox was not a handsome man, and his complete indifference to his outward appearance did not help him to look any more so. He was shy with strangers … and his extremely nervous laugh, accompanied by a hysterical intake of the breath, was the reverse of attractive. He generally wore a pair of stained grey flannel trousers, very baggy at the knees because they were never pressed … Out of doors he wore a somewhat greasy and battered black trilby hat, and if the weather was wet a cheap raincoat. All his clothing indeed was cheap, as it was apparently part of his rule of life not to spend an unnecessary penny on clothes. He used to go into outfitters’ shops asking for ‘the sort of shirt a workman wears’.
That “apparently” shows the very private nature of the self-discipline at the Oratory. Raggedness was not supposed to evoke pity. Wilfred registered mild annoyance when gifts of underclothing and wine appeared in his bicycle basket after a service at the parish church. These windfalls were, as far as possible, shared. And, dismayed though Brittain was by the grey flannel trousers—soon to become part of the archaeology of Cambridge—he characterizes Wilfred as “witty, humble, shrewd in his judgement of men and affairs, charitable, compassionate and saintly.” Certainly at the Oratory Wilfred’s loneliness was healed, and he allowed himself the heresy, if it was one, that there will be a place for such small communities, still together, still understanding one another, in the life to come.
The garden, where Jack Bagley had had to dodge the spade and hoe, was Wilfred’s daily resource between two and four in the afternoon. Gardening was simply gardening, therefore the best of recreations. “I always start pruning my roses on Lady Day, not out of devotion to the Rosa Mistica, but because it is an easy fixed date to remember.” Smith, the cook’s husband, who did the vegetables but never exceeded his sphere, claimed to have brought Father Knox to gardening, but Wilfred had always known how to do it. Ronnie recalled that at Edmundthorpe they had each been given a patch of earth, but only Wilfred’s had flourished. Ronnie, however, really liked the temporary sense of power in a garden, popping fuchsia buds and blowing tobacco smoke into white flowers to make them turn yellow. Wilfred would not have stood for this at Lady Margaret Road. On the subject of plants, only Mrs K. and Christina were permitted to offer him advice.
Part of the summer was spent with the Cambridge Mission to fruit-pickers, at Hickman’s, a grim-looking field close to the main road. Most of the fruit-pickers came down from the East End, and it was a privilege for him to meet them again. In June, he and Eddie went fishing.
Out of the many parishes in England where they had been on holiday with the Bishop, the brothers settled, for their fishing, on Kington in Herefordshire. It is a little hill town, a sheep and pony market, on the debatable Welsh borderland. The stream they fished was the Arrow, which rises in the Marches, runs through the main street of Kington, and falls into the Lug at Leominster. “Arrow” in Welsh means “rough water”, and, though beautiful, it was not an easy stream. It was, as Eddie wrote, “rather too full of herons and otters and kingfishers and cows”, and densely over-grown with bushes on both banks. Sometimes Eddie suspected that the cows might be eating the trout, so few were to be seen.
But the rule of the local club was “no wading”—laid down, apparently, after Henry Tudor crossed the Arrow on his way to the battle of Bosworth. And on the principle of “doing the most difficult thing” the brothers remained devoted to this lovely water for more than twenty years. They knew every kingfisher’s nest in the bank-holes and every gradation of the light during the evening rise, when the trout come up to the surface like dancers. Set them down in the darkness by the Arrow or the Lug, and they could tell you in a moment by what reach or what deep pool they stood. Their meeting point every year was a shop in Leominster, kept by a Miss Blomer, who knew nothing at all about fishing, but could tie any fly that was described to her; each of them kept a record of catches, and at the end of the day they exchanged books, and accused each other of being fanciful.
During these years of restored happiness Wilfred found writing moderately easy. On holiday he read only detective stories; back at the Oratory, working direct onto his frightful typewriter, he wrote apologetics and historical theology, and began his great study of the background of St Paul; but he also published a small, modest book, which has become a great favourite, Meditation and Mental Prayer. He made no claims for it; it was only a summary, he said, in convenient form. It takes the reader, in the most disarming way, past all the real difficulties. All prayer, Wilfred tells us, is answered. As for those who feel that the whole idea is beyond them, “a person who is not clever enough to practise mental prayer is not clever enough to be entrusted with the ordinary affairs of daily life, and ought to be shut up in an asylum or a private home.” Wilfred could be very astringent at times.
When Eddie went back from holiday he was still a countryman, or, rather, a commuter. Christina and he had decided to try somewhere withi
n easy reach of London, where they could keep hens and grow vegetables and put up a swing for the children, and everything would be cheap. In this expectation they found a homely mock-Tudor house with a lawn and a cherry tree, in Balcombe, near Haywards Heath in Sussex.
Balcombe, to quote the title of the book Eddie wrote about it, was An Hour from Victoria; Sussex, favoured by writers since the turn of the century, was now the centre of the second wave of the Georgian movement. The bookshops, Eddie found, were stacked with volumes of poetry in which “innumerable writers stated their firm conviction that Sussex not only contained Downs, but that these Downs were adjacent to the Sea.” These were the pale followers of Belloc and Kipling; meanwhile the simple fellows with smocks and clay pipes in the bar parlours turned out to be regional novelists, on the lookout for Sussex hinds. But even these were outnumbered by the weekenders. On Saturdays the lanes smoked with the adventurous traffic of the 1920s.
The village itself was a different matter, and the young Knoxes were discreetly welcomed. The rector suggested that as he believed Eddie was a writer, he might try a history of the local Ancient Ironworks, and act as secretary of the debating club, which met in a room hired from the Village Institute. Here—or so he insisted—Eddie proposed debates on: “The League of Nations”; “That Mr. G. B. Shaw is the most promising young dramatist since Shakespeare, and his future may be looked forward to with confidence”; “That this Club strongly opposes the Einstein Theory of Relativity, and considers it injurious to health and morals”. But no one came, until he proposed: “That the butcher’s prices have increased, are increasing, and ought to be diminished”. There was only one butcher in Balcombe.
The presiding genius of Sussex, as has been said, was Hilaire Belloc. Kipling, who was living at Batemans, received guests, but went out very little. Belloc, though much broken down by his wife’s death, still strode across the downs with the energy of an old Gaul, and kept up the true customs of Merrie England at King’s Land. Ronnie, as the coming Catholic writer, had been to stay with him for the Christmas of 1921, and, perhaps as a sequel to this, Belloc suddenly appeared at Balcombe one Sunday in the following June and said he had come to luncheon. In spite of the high concentration of poets in the area he was very conspicuous, solid, almost cubical in shape, heavily dressed in black in the summer heat. Eddie recalled that Belloc had once, when standing as Liberal candidate for Salford, come to Bishopscourt and suffered terribly from the sour claret; when asked how he slept, he replied that he hadn’t, and had had to sit up all night reading. At Balcombe, however, there were one or two bottles of good hock, but before they could be fetched, Belloc, marching in, produced from under his black garments a flagon of his own wine, apparently bottled by himself. After this doubtful compliment lunch began well enough, until Belloc uttered a cry, more like the horn of Roland echoing over waste places: “Bread! But we eat like the English, without bread!” In those days the baker brought “two small browns”, or whatever was ordered, every morning in the pony-trap; in the afternoon there was no more to be had. Belloc could not accept a small brown as bread, and was, perhaps, doomed to another sleepless night.
A few years afterwards, Belloc showed his weary and sympathetic side when he wrote to Eddie about his satire, Belinda: “It is the only book I have written with care since The Path to Rome and I hope I shall never write a book with any care again, for care is a great burden.” Eddie, who was making a list of things he could and couldn’t do in case of emergencies (“I can’t milk or do the things that work electrical things; I can saw wood and if the two cuts don’t meet, bang it about until the piece comes off; I can’t bake; I can work a lift and black boots and polish brown ones and do bacon and eggs—learned in lodgings”), added privately that, though he admired him very much, he could not entertain Hilaire Belloc.
As Evoe of Punch, his correspondence grew. To take only two items from the “files”, now the drawers of a desk, rather than a hat box: a letter from a Polish reader, addressed from Warsaw to “The Very Renown Evoe of Punch, care of the Daily News” from America, an invitation to give humorous evenings for the International Chautauqua Association, “Brings Entertainment to Your Door, Every Kind for Every Occasion”. But Eddie, like Ronnie, never felt quite confident enough to make a personal appearance in the United States.
During the Twenties he was particularly well known as a parodist. Parody, an art which has declined with the disappearance of a recognizable literary style, depends on the finer shades of exaggeration. Eddie was gentle—much gentler, for instance, than Max Beerbohm—but wonderfully accurate. Walter de la Mare was a favourite subject, perhaps because Eddie loved his poetry, perhaps because it was so difficult to render delicate uncanniness by delicate absurdity. In Eddie’s “The Lost Bus” the driver has a moustache green with moss, the destination boards trail with weeds, and, entangled in its own magic syllables, “topples the bus and heels”. The idea appealed to de la Mare himself. Indeed, with a few exceptions, the authors were enthusiastic; Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, the author of Tarzan, wrote rather unexpectedly from Tarzana Ranch, Reseda, California, that “you have saved me from oblivion”.
Owen Seaman raised his remuneration to twelve guineas for a poem. It was time to branch out a little and to buy a motor-car. A gleaming new Citroën arrived, about which Eddie found it difficult to make any comment, except “to sneer because the speedometer had to be wound up by hand”. With the car came the lady driving teacher, Miss Gompertz, in leather gauntlets, the very spirit of the 1920s. “I don’t want speed to brace my nerves; I want it for its own sake.” Nevertheless, every time the Citroën passed a breakdown or a puncture, Miss Gompertz gave instructions to pull up, with the quiet words: “Let us not forget the chivalry of the road.”
The car had to be kept in a kind of byre or hen-roost—what Eddie called a “wild garage”. On one occasion, stopping abruptly to avoid a goat, he turned the car over onto its side, without the least damage. The villagers, he thought, were disappointed; Miss Gompertz had not given instructions on how to address people through the windscreen of a car turned over on its side. But Eddie was far too impatient ever to be a good driver. That had to be left to Christina.
Balcombe, before very long, proved to be too far from the heart of things. In September 1920 Eddie had been invited to the Table—the weekly meeting of the Punch editorial staff. “You will not find us a formidable body,” wrote Philip Agnew, the managing director, “(please remember that we do not even dress for dinner) and we shall gladly welcome our new man.” In 1921 he joined the regular staff. After work there were the clubs, then an important part of the professional literary career. Eddie had been elected to the Savile in 1920, although Christina and he both felt the ten-guinea subscription was going to be hard to manage, and the Garrick in 1925; in 1921 he had been a guest at E.V. Lucas’s famous Garrick dinner for Charlie Chaplin, when Barrie had asked Chaplin to play Peter Pan. In fact, unassertive as he was, Eddie’s wit made him much in demand as a guest; he was a host, however, by temperament. All this was difficult if one lived an hour from Victoria.
The hens, the lawnmower and the rabbit hutches were sold; they would have to return to London. But, once again, they were hopeful of finding something in Hampstead, where they had always been happy, and the air was quite fresh.
Dilly, also, had moved to the country, but with considerably more reluctance, and, in his case, for a lifetime.
He married Olive Roddam in July 1920, at Ingram Parish Church in Northumberland. It is no criticism of the Roddams, an honourable line of squires and soldiers whose lands were first granted by King Athelstan, to say that they were somewhat uncertain how to get on with the gaunt and hesitant bridegroom, about whose “war work” so little could be said, who was known to be very clever, and, although a bishop’s son, rather different from the kind of man they had expected Olive to marry. She had formerly been engaged to the son of a neighbouring landowner, a young man called Christopher; they had agreed that if he did
not come back from the Front, and Olive married, she would call her first son after him. Christopher was killed in 1914 and Olive’s brother in 1915; it was partly to recover from the shock that she had gone to London to work in the Admiralty; she had come back with Dilly.
Dilly was somewhat on his own at the wedding. One of his Cambridge friends was best man. Bishop Knox could not come; he was in the thick of the Lambeth Conference, battling over the Prayer Book. The brothers would have liked to come, but in his nervous agitation Dilly forgot to ask them. He was most anxious to please, but worried, even by the kindly hospitality of the Roddams. The gifts—the old lace, the piano music, the enormous quantities of silver and china—where could they be accommodated? What kind of life could he offer to Olive? He felt himself in alien territory. The Alnwick Gazette, which reported the wedding, noted in its editorial that day that “it shows a right grip of the affairs of life that in all our sports we have well nigh thrown off the depression of war, still, however, missing the jolly fellows now in happier hunting grounds. Full cry ahead lie the meetings of the Percy Hunt (with festivities to be generously provided). Yoick! Yoick!” Dilly, with all his anxious affection, could not Yoick. Would he be able to make her even passably happy?
On their return from a honeymoon in Scotland, he took her back to Chelsea. Frank Birch had also married (Maynard Keynes having organized a generous gift from King’s for both young couples), and it seemed at first to Dilly that they could all set up housekeeping together in Edith Grove. With this in mind he enthusiastically bought a two-shilling cookery book, and opened an account with the Kensington Unique Laundry. But the arrangement did not work out well.
The Knox Brothers Page 19