Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Charles knew that he was there for reasons primarily of scholarship. Nonethless in his first year 1903–4 he completed all the challenges expected of a fourteen-year-old: ran ‘mis maz’, climbed ‘Hills’, learnt Shelley’s ‘Arethustra’. Among his classmates were Charles Asquith and John Chisholm-Batten. There was A. P. Herbert, later a novelist, whose mother Lady Carnarvon would be known for her humanitarian acts during the war, also James Steuart Wilson, a clergyman’s son with a beautiful singing voice, A. G. Hess, George and Tom Gilroy and David Clutterbuck: all of whom he counted as friends. Another classmate, the splendidly named Lyonulphe Tollemache, was in the ‘Sick House’ when Charles was first ill and sent there,

  Lyon is ripping, he’s the only person I’ve had a good crack wi’ yet. He is so intelligent … Today is Lyon’s birthday, and I was his first-foot as it were. I, as 12 slowly boomed out on Coll. Clock, wished him many happy, etc., before going to sleep. Altogether I think yesterday was one of my happiest days here, for that reason chiefly.3

  Charles could not see his parents every weekend, but he did write to his dear Mama and his intense, over-excited letters show how he threw himself into the world of books, reading his way through the Moberly Library, an extensive collection donated by its namesake. It was the only place he could read alone, as prep time was communal. His first letter home began, ‘Adam Bede is good.’ Here were the eternal truths of wealth and poverty, vice and virtue that would keep him steady. He went on to describe a visit to local churches in his time off: Otterbourne, Eastleigh, and Golden Common, and drew sketches of details of one of the pillars. He found he was inspired by both literary and visual aesthetics.

  He felt the need to do well, but also the desire not to. Sitting in ancient wood-panelled rooms, with the dust of time settling over him, he absorbed the silence, the stones, the carved mantelpieces. He was reading Keats and pondering the oneness of truth with beauty and goodness: a unity which these buildings and this place seemed to sum up for him. Mr Rendall, the College Housemaster, introduced his boys early to Keats’s thinking. He was an intrepid bachelor who came from a vicarage family of nine boys, through Classical scholarships at Harrow and Cambridge, and his career had been solely as master at Winchester. Spartan and eccentric, he rarely wore a coat and liked twelve-mile walks or runs as casual exercise. Italian art and architecture were his great loves; he introduced serious lessons on art and was the president of SCROGUS, the Shakespeare reading society. This diversion into the arts was relatively new to Winchester which had, until now, studied undiluted Latin and Greek. The Classics were however still the major part of the syllabus. In a letter to his father, to whom he wrote less often, Charles said, ‘We are reading Homer and Plato, Horace and Tacitus this term; at present we are getting into the second Iliad, Laches, Ars Poetica, and Agricola, respectively: in history we are beginning Greek History from the very darkest Ages – In English, Chaucer’s Prologue…’ He went on to mention that he had taken up carpentry: ‘The two school carpenters who teach me are very ingenious and much–experienced.’4 With this new skill he was able to improve his study area, building new bookshelves and fitting them himself, with a small but loud hammer which he inadvertently aimed at the Victorian electric light system, sending the entire college into darkness.

  One day in 1903, he wrote home, ‘I am getting on quite well in work you will be glad to hear, and am making friends…’ that bit to please his parents, then the real Charles lost in a reverie … ‘Everything goes as usual, and will go on, I suppose, as it has for five centuries. I marvel when I think of quaint, long-haired college juniors who sat where my equals and I now sit, and discussed war news, not of Japs and Russians, but of Armigers and Burgundians, or of Yorkists and Lancastrians!’5

  As well as dreaming of the past, Charles was beginning, less romantically, to look at the people of the present and to compare his own situation with that of others. In his second year he visited a charity school, described in a letter home,

  Pallid girls with their hair over their ears were teaching terribly ugly children. Bright, cheery rooms, with dusty models of giraffes and hippopotami on the mantelpiece in the first room … The boys were pent in glass cages around a square hall, where an agnostic with fiery red hair raved to a class of some twenty lifeless shapes. The cleverest and oldest looking were playing rounders in the yard – I suppose they aren’t made to learn.6

  He realised how lucky he was, as a member of the select school, so different from the shabby world around. He also visited an elderly couple, through an introduction from his parents: ‘Mrs receives in her bedroom and they up-grub their meals there, but you don’t notice it much,’ Charles wrote to Meg, who had escaped such a fate through her good marriage and determination to write. ‘She wore a white linen robe with a blue cord, like an angelic nun, and lay on a rest couch with a blue cushion. Her face is sweeter than the daughter and very resigned and refined. I wish nice people weren’t so poor.’7

  School gave him an intellectual life and a community, one that he could share, to a certain extent, with his mother. He wasn’t good at games and didn’t like them much, but he did enjoy the esprit de corps of the Cadet Force.

  Field Day – we took part in a battle royal in a wood, very like the drum scene in Through the Looking Glass. The wood was stuffy and musty with the reek of powder and the crash of five great schools firing at each other (Eton and Charterhouse vs. Bradfield, Wellington and Winchester). I don’t think anybody won, but you never can tell. We lunched by a roadside with long tables spread with rough and ready delicacies, and motors came slipping along every minute, as it’s the Portsmouth to London road, and very important.8

  When his mother came to the Eton–Winchester Cricket Match in 1904 – the first time Winchester had won since 1897 – Charles was shouting for batsman Gordon who was a College man, a scholar like himself. In celebration Gordon was dragged from the pavilion by force, raised shoulder high and carried round only half-dressed, then up through Meads, the green meadows by the river. ‘Did you see us carrying Gordon? I was right under him!’9 boasted Charles when he joined his family, flushed and happy.

  He adored his mother with her beautiful clothing and figure, dramatic height and natural confidence, and was proud to take her round his friends at the match. His school letters to her are addressed ‘Dear Lady’, ‘Dearest Cerissette’, ‘Dear Homebirdy’, ‘My dearest One’, and he would occasionally sign a guilty ‘Yours Lunatically’, or ‘A Putrescence’.10 When he became ill with tonsillitis and was put in ‘Sick House’ for over a week, the housemaster wrote, ‘Scott Moncrieff is the kind of boy who is quite happy in bed if he has plenty of literature, only it must be literature.’11 Charles’s letters were full of comments on the books he was reading and lending:

  I have a continual drain on my books by people’s borrowing and losing them. What a master Trollope is. How can anyone compare Bleak House to the Last Chronicles of Barset? Toogood is introduced as vulgar and horrid, and turns out so noble, with his ideas of romance and ‘blood being thicker than porridge’. My father has not got Framley Parsonage, has he?… Memories of Vailima is very short, but contains some very fine things. It begins with verses written in 1872 by R.L.S. I am so glad you like Songs of Travel: though it is a very slim volume yet it contains a lot of gems … Destiny is glorious. Why is Miss Ferrier not known as well as Miss Edgeworth? she is quite as good. Destiny bound in iron would be pleasant, but how much more so if bound in a delightful kind of salmon-coloured cloth … Tell Colin to make his book club send him The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton. A charming, if whimsical, book …

  Quirk came down here (Sick House) yesterday with a bland look and a set of Aristophanes under his arm, of which he read, or I read to him, some 150 lines before he retired, which was not bad. He returned to me The Return of the Native, or rather a fresh copy: he had become so engrossed in mine as to overwhelm it with private marks which he wanted to keep. I read A Pair of Blue Eyes all through yesterday: I had n
ot read it for nearly a year and thought a lot more of it than before. I agree now with you that it is very sad. I had not then seen quite how sad: But none of them could be a patch on The Return of the Native …12

  For Christmas 1904, Charles copied out Music and Moonlight, the poems and songs of Arthur O’Shaughnessy, for his mother and illustrated them with the inscription, ‘embellished by a young man of genteel family, not yet prominent in the world’.13 The comment was playful, tongue in cheek; on the other hand scholars at Winchester were expected to be successful. He also illustrated his letters home: one in particular when he knew his mother was staining the floors at Edgemoor and working hard on decorating while he sat languidly at school reading literature and writing poetry. ‘Much lovelets from your abominable, blear-eyed, cloudy brained, horrid little youngest.’14

  * * *

  His family were still integral to his life, despite the distractions of school. He wrote about his eldest brother in 1905, ‘I am longing to see Colin again, he is so good and peaceful and quietly humorous.’15 Colin was now a curate in an impoverished London East End parish and ‘whirled around in his black gown hurling soup tickets through widows windows’.16 Charles invited him to attend his confirmation in 1905, in the comparative luxury of Winchester.

  Colin turned up at noon livid with cold, and we warmed at the fire in Second Chamber. I took him to Museum and he glanced at the pictures, but felt like a low-life-high-thought-prophet who has strayed into the Lord Mayor’s banquet, who, as his coat and hat have been whipped off by domestics, feels he must go in.17

  To see the contrast in their lives, Charles went to stay with Colin in April 1905. His brother was not home till after eleven on most nights, but their father George made the trip to London to entertain Charles and took him to the zoo, to lunch at his club, to visit the Irving cousins, to Madame Tussaud’s, to Lyons for tea, and to Great Smith Street baths. They also met a second cousin, Constance Lunn, whose family invited Charles and Colin to tea. Constance greeted them in fine silks and lace and presented Charles with a copy of the Lyra Sacra, a book of religious verse, first published in 1895, which he kept to the end of his life. Constance was twenty and Colin twenty-six, and they had plenty in common, as she was a parson’s daughter and he an enthusiastic curate. Connie was petite with an hour-glass figure, thick chestnut hair and languorous eyes; Colin was over six foot, big-boned with a high forehead; his serious mission in life gave him an intensity and passion. It didn’t take long for love to blossom.

  In summer 1906, the Scott Moncrieffs went on their last family holiday before Colin’s marriage. They travelled by train to the Swiss Alps and stayed at Gimel and then at Lucerne, walking in the mountains. Colin practised his sermons on the family while Charles was ill in bed with a worryingly high temperature, composing poetry of a very different nature.

  Mark how his body stiffening to the leap

  The cry, the fiery line of flashing limb

  The water rising to the kiss of him18

  Thinking of the young Wykehamists bathing in Gunners Hole, a part of the nearby river in the summer, he wrote,

  … white and cool

  Now he emerges. All the joyful grass,

  Trembling and breaking in flowers at his feet,

  With wondrous fragrance notes where he shall pass,

  While we, his fellow-men, worship, alas

  In silence, whom we dare not run to greet.

  Yea – but to worship him alone – how sweet!19

  While Colin wrote sermons about the adoration of God, Charles, with similar language, was secretly, in his book of private poetry, praising the beauty of living boys.

  * * *

  Two years later on 27 September 1907, Colin married Constance. They shared much of the same philosophy: a humorous and courageous attitude to life and an unquestioning devotion to their faith. Constance was beautiful, profound, dutiful: as a clergyman’s daughter, she was perfectly fitted for the role of vicar’s wife, bearing Colin eight children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. The wedding took place at her family home, the vicarage at Chillingham, Northumberland. It was still the custom in 1907 to publish lists of wedding presents in the local newspaper and under ‘Charles Scott Moncrieff: brother’, is listed, ‘small table and cheque’. He had made the table in the school carpentry workshop and was proud enough to show it off in public. He also wrote a poem to Colin and Constance on thick vellum paper, wishing their marriage well, and ending with the hope that they would ‘inspire our Colony by their Constancy’20. They set sail immediately for New Zealand where Colin had been appointed lecturer in Divinity at St John’s College in Auckland.

  Although Charles admired the transparent goodness of his brother and sister-in-law, his experience at school had already got him into murky waters. At Winchester, Charles wrote that he felt both fearful and superior. Superior because he was a scholar but fearful because of the ragging this invited from commoners; having no brothers and sisters his own age he was not used to teasing. He was also fearful of beatings from prefects. ‘Tunding’ was a flogging administered with a ground ash stick. To be ‘Cut Into’ was more severe, meaning to thrash with a ground ash till cuts appeared. No more than a dozen cuts were to be given, but prefects were allowed to administer them. In one of his early letters, he wrote, ‘I am happy here now, happy in a quiet, self-respecting, superior-fearing sort of way, but happy all the same.’ However, it was evident something was bothering him.

  CHAPTER 4

  First Love Affairs

  A Child – athirst to stand admired:

  A Boy – aflame to feel desired:

  CKSM, poetry notebook, 1906

  Two years after Charles’s arrival at Winchester, the Vicar of Compton Rectory invited him to tea. He lent him a book on St Francis of Assisi and kept asking him to sit in different chairs in his drawing room,

  ostensibly for comfort and finally at tea installing me in a chair commanding all the window’s lore: a golf course with a sunset on the top, lines of grey and lemon. When the lemon had changed from orange to a dried blood tint, I could no longer refrain from giving tongue. He then explained blandly that that was why he had given me the chair, ‘I thought you would notice what other people wouldn’t…’1

  The vicar recognised that Charles was different, perhaps guessed how different. Compton Rectory lies three miles south of Winchester, an easy walk for sixteen-year-olds, and it was there in November 1905 that Charles wrote a sonnet dedicated first to David Clutterbuck, then scored out and dedicated to Lyonulphe Tollemache. It begins: ‘Alone upon the naked hill we two,’ then there is a picture of an erect penis inked over the text,

  Am I not brother and more to you, And are you not my brother? . .

  Bend over me – lean down, dear love, lean down,

  And though it were well that each should quite forget

  The other: for the sorrow in my heart.2

  Both David and Lyonulphe came to stay at Lanark for holidays and had their names recorded in the visitors’ book. At Edgemoor during the Easter Holiday of 1906, they climbed hills, visited Edinburgh and Glasgow, played golf, and went to church with the Scott Moncrieffs. Charles dedicated some of his other early poems to David and Lyonulph. These were published (without the dedications, which were only written in pencil in his poetry notebook) in the school magazine, The Wykehamist. From the age of fifteen Charles had poems published regularly in the magazine and a year later in the journals the Westminster Gazette and the Academy. His parents were proud of his poetry, and the school magazine recognised it as accomplished and entertaining. However for Charles it reflected the profound unrest he felt at his desire for fellow boys. The title of one poem seemed to justify it all ‘God and one Man – Make a Majority’, so long as God forgave him, everyone else was irrelevant.

  … I will fight for Thee if I may fight with Thee

  Against our strength what mortal might endure?

  Make me thine armour-bearer, Lord, but prithee

  Let
none reproach me that I am not pure.

  What God hath cleansed may no man call common

  Then cleanse me Lord that I be clean and fair,

  So may Thy Son who scorned not Birth of Woman

  Enter my Heart and make His Temple there.3

  This religious verse, inspired by the metaphysical poets, with its strong awareness of sin and desire for cleansing, was dedicated to his friend David Clutterbuck. His letters home, as well as listing his voracious reading of everything high and low, sacred and profane, begged his mother, ‘Please pray for me to be good.’ ‘Pray that I may be good, I want to be good.’4 Among these letters, torn from a jotter is the beginning of a short story about a little pale boy in the heavy black gown of a scholar sitting at the back of the classroom. He has a weak mind, added to and controlled by an abnormally weak body which makes him too slack to join with any spirit in games. ‘He was in short what is ably termed a wreck.’

  … for are we not each a part of a great fleet, to which that of Xerxes would be as a rowing-boat to a man-of-war; so we sail forth, all alike, at the start, all with equal hopes of a fair voyage? Yet how few come back. Some, shattered at an early age by sickness, others, as the boy in question, disabled owing to incompetency in facing the earliest difficulties of life. Others, later still, sunk in battle, or driven ashore by the gale of their own passions.5