by Jean Findlay
The story is not erotic; it is about snobbery, hypocrisy, the public school system and the fact that, among adolescent boys, homosexual acts were not uncommon. The older boy becomes a headmaster and is just about to punish a child for a sexual offence when he remembers he did the same as a boy and into his mind ‘floated a picture of two boys in a thicket; of the one’s charming nonchalance; of terror sickening the other, a child that had just lost his soul’. He discovers that the boy he is about to punish is the son of the boy he himself seduced at school and remembers a letter from him of how he had been lowered as a result, how his children would be barred from the great public schools and would have to attend a minor school such as this one. Instead of being understanding, he violently condemns the boys in his care for similar acts – ‘his flaying sarcasm and his pessimistic prophecies drew great salt tears from the younger boy’s eyes’ – expels them and ruins their lives.
Charles had shared the experience of both children. The younger, aged fourteen, was terrified, for all the reasons he knew; for the punishment of ‘tunding’ and being cut into if he didn’t do as the older boy asked. Later, as the older boy, he was frightened of the spiritual consequences of seducing a younger boy. He knew his New Testament, Luke 17: ‘It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.’ He was in physical shock at the knowledge of temptation, the desire, the need for affection; all were consummated in this one act on his knees in the bushes. On the other hand the portrait of the headmaster’s bad conscience was all too acutely observed,
Before his ordination he had prayed for spiritual armour, and had received a coat of self-satisfaction which had so far held out against all assaults of man or woman. Now it felt rusty … Then he picked up the sheet of tremendously coat-armoured school notepaper … On it he drew obscene figures for half-an-hour.
He had painted a recognisable picture of a Winchester master. What was seen as Charles’s arrogance and insolence had its consequences. He hoped to go up to Oxford to try for a scholarship to Magdalen or Exeter, just as his older brother Colin had won a scholarship to Queen’s. The Oxford scholarships depended on both the competitive entrance examination in March and the report from the headmaster at Winchester. J. M. Burge, the headmaster, still smarting from the scandalous story circulated among parents, wrote to Charles’s father in April 1908 saying that the competition in the Oxford Scholarship Exam was, ‘too “hot” for him at this stage … He must not let his taste and style become too wayward – or his pen run away with him into the waste places of “Journalese”.’32 The patronising tone masked real anger: Charles’ ‘Journalese’ was far too ‘hot’ for the headmaster. Even one hundred years later, a school magazine would hesitate before publishing such a story.
In March Charles sat both exams: the scholarship for Exeter College and a Magdalen College Demyship. In April Dr Burge wrote the letter. We do not know whether he failed to get in because of the exams or because of the headmaster’s report. But his failure was a blow: as a scholar he had expected to follow his brother, all his good friends were Oxford bound, and it was undoubtably where he would have met the most like-minded of colleagues.
The last Domum Day for those who were leaving school came at the end of July. The band played in the Meads until dusk. The school sang again and again, until everyone left except the scholars and their parents, who went into the chapel for prayers.
Too much time spent indoors writing poetry and reading romantic novels was not considered healthy for a young man of eighteen. Sheriff George Scott Moncrieff no doubt blamed this for Charles’s final error in expending his energies on risky journalese. Charles was therefore encouraged by parents and masters to join the School Cadet Unit which left for Aldershot immediately after the final service at Winchester, to join the Public Schools Brigade in camp for a week’s training. He enjoyed outdoor exercise in the company of other youths, being gradually trained for responsibility and leadership. He could put behind him the bitter disappointment of failing to get into Oxford and the humiliation of having his magazine abruptly stopped, withdrawn from circulation and pulped.
It was with mixed feelings then that he left the school he had entered five years before with so much promise, which had helped form his literary and aesthetic tastes. It really did mean Domum, home, to him, with the companionship of his friends, the stimulation from the masters and the dreamy beauty of the buildings, fields and river. Later he would write longing poems from the Western Front, of nostalgia for this boyhood idyll.
CHAPTER 5
To Edinburgh
Ask Satan, please, to be my friend:
He would do anything for you.
CKSM, ‘To a Public Man’, 1909
Named after Joseph Lister, the father of modern surgery, Lister House was an eighteenth-century tenement, five storeys tall with a dormer attic peeking out on to the slate rooftops. Off the top of the Royal Mile near Edinburgh Castle, an arched entrance to a narrow passage opened out into a courtyard, where ragged children were playing hopscotch and skipping. Charles had to climb three storeys to his room, up a stone stairway with no light, but his twelve-paned window looked out on to the highest view in all Edinburgh: from the top of the Mound across the Firth of Forth to the Island of May and the Kingdom of Fife.
Charles and Meg had visited this student residence during the summer and ‘liked it’ as she recorded. But as the winter closed in Charles scribbled notes on the back of envelopes about freezing among piles of bleak, unforgiving stones. After a brisk Scottish childhood, he had experienced teenage warmth and companionship in an English public school – and now he had come back to study in the cold winds among the smoke-blackened stone of Auld Reekie. He found one other Wykehamist at Lister House, ‘Young Maconochie, who is in his tenth year of Law,’ he quipped to his parents in his first letter home. ‘Also there is a pianist who plays the same polka, or at least stops in the same place every time on the floor below…’1
He was not enrolled in any faculty when he first moved to Edinburgh in 1908. He had begged his parents to be allowed to try once more for the Oxford and Cambridge Entrance Examinations and to have this year to study for them. Convinced that he could win the same honours as Colin, his parents agreed to pay his way, not having had to pay full school fees during his years as a Winchester scholar.
He often went home for house parties at Lanark when he would invite a guest, or meet family friends of his and his brother John’s age. His mother made sure there were plenty of young women invited. Among these were Amy, Gladys and Lily Dalyell, sisters of his friend Theodore from Winchester. Also three of the seven Wood sisters Anna, Rita and Molly from Edinburgh; Anna would eventually marry his brother John. John was still studying and failing veterinary exams at Glasgow, which he had been doing since 1902; his attempt to pass as a vet would go on for another five years during which time he gave up and was sent to the Colonies twice, hated it and returned home. He was the least academic boy in the family but his understanding of animals and his determination saw him through. He finally qualified, to everyone’s relief, in July 1913. Lanark was equidistant from Edinburgh and Glasgow and the brothers saw a lot of each other. Colin, however, was far away in New Zealand, teaching and starting a family with Connie.
That Christmas John and Charles read Milton’s ‘Ode’ in front of the fire before breakfast with their parents as they had done for as long as they could remember. They also acted, as they always had, in their mother’s play The True Lover, first for family and friends and then as a New Year entertainment, for the Convalescent Home in Lanark, Charles playing the lead male part and their friend Norah Bayley Jones the leading lady. The Bayley Joneses had their own New Year pantomime in Edinburgh where Charles played the part of Prince Charming before family and friends and local charitable organisations. Ideal for the part, Charles at nineteen was strikingly handsome and was invited to balls and house parties around Scotl
and, partnered by the prettiest and most interesting of women. Sadly for his mother, his letters hardly ever mentioned these girls. If romance was on his mind it was with men, and he could only share that with his book of private poems. In March 1909 Charles brought a new friend, Alec Tonnochy, back to Lanark for the week. Meg wrote that he sang beautifully and was a tall, delicate and gentlemanly lad – ‘Like a swan’.2 They went to church on Sunday where ‘Charlie read the lessons with so much feeling – I do wish he were going to be ordained.’3 Meg then travelled to Edinburgh leaving Charlie and Alec at Edgemoor. On her return she noted that Tonnachy was gone and, alone ‘Charlie swam in the Mouse [a freezing hill loch] which seemed risky.’4
In Charles’s book of poems is a sonnet entitled ‘My Mistake’ dated April 1909:
Thinking Love’s Empire lay along that way
Where the new-duggen grave of friendship gaped,
We fell therein, and, weary, slept till day.
But with the sun you rose, and clean escaped,
Strode honourably homewards. Slowly I
Crept out upon the crumbling other side.
And thither held my way where love should lie
But scorn set hedges rent my cloke of Pride
And stones my feet – that yet no nearer came.
I looked to you – but you were gone from sight
To honour in an honest house of shame:–
Should I press on, hills hide the road, and night.
And should I turn the bitter pathway lies
Across that grave; where, smothered, friendship dies.5
It was St Augustine who wrote that his own homosexuality was primarily a sin against friendship. Charles’s ‘new-duggen grave’ suggests that he had pushed friendship too far. It did not bother him for long; a month later he was in love once more, writing to a friend in the south;
Dear man!
Those birds remembered first to sing
That saw together you and me and Spring;
And I was happiest.6
That May he went to Winchester for the Eton match, visited old schoolfriends in Cambridge and then dropped in on Robert Ross in London. Later that summer his experiences moved from happy to bitter. On his visit to Oxford in August to resit entrance exams, he thought he would take up an invitation from Frank Benson, an actor he had shown round Winchester in his last year there. Inserted into his poetry book at this date is a letter from Benson of 15 July 1908 – the year before – thanking him for his kind hospitality to his wife and himself on Pageant Sunday at Winchester and inviting him to visit him when next in Oxford. Charles’s poem ‘To a Public Man’ was probably the result of his meeting with Benson:
I have admired so your life,
So watcht you on your curious way!
I am too male to be your wife
And most I look towards the day
When, slightly leaner in the loin,
Strippt of your pretty pants and paints,
Death shall dispatch you, dear, to join
A cunning company of saints.
Then will my prayers like smoke descend
And melt like well-developed dew.
Ask Satan, please, to be my friend: –
He would do anything for you.7
Benson was famous: later, in 1916, his performance in Julius Caesar pleased King George V so much that the monarch summoned him after he came off stage at Drury Lane and promptly knighted him. (At that time very few actors were knighted, the first being Henry Irving in 1895.) ‘Strippt of your pretty pants and paints’ – who wears paints but an actor? The final damning lines of the poem invoking Satan with a Faustian invitation imply that this encounter with Benson was one where Charles felt exploited and begs the question of his actual sexual experience to date. Perhaps it was not the romantic Millard who took his virginity, but the hurried, and married, Benson. This is the only really angry poem he wrote until after the war.
When Charles sat the Oxford entrance exam again, of the five subjects, he received high marks only in Latin, passes in English and French and low marks in Greek and Mathematics. With such results he gave up all hope of Oxford and began in 1909, as had his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, to read for a Law degree at Edinburgh. In his first academic year he attended the lectures of Professor Hardie in Latin and of Professor Millar on Constitutional Law; the following year, he studied logic and metaphysics under Professor Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison and took Honours in the class of Public Law. This blast of rigour and rote learning in a cold climate was refreshing but he missed his schoolfriends and the exotic company of Ross, Millard and the Wilde group with whom he kept in contact: Ross wrote to Millard in January 1909 asking, ‘I wish you would tell me what has happened to Moncrieff. Is he reformed?’8 ‘Reform’ was always an option for any attractive but serious young man who had finished with homosexual experimenting, and was constantly offered to Charles in the form of introductions to young women.
His travelling from Edinburgh to the south in search of congenial company and old friends continued throughout his time at university. But he did make one great friend at Edinburgh. His name was Richard Reynolds Ball – referred to as Ball by Meg in her diaries where she described him as a designer of metal and glass who shared an interest in her carving, painting and design. Ten years older than Charles, Richard was the only son of a clergyman, an old Wykehamist, and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He became almost a fixture at Edgemoor, and Meg sometimes visited his Edinburgh workshop to see his designs. By 1910 he was sharing rooms with Charles at Lister House. A family story told how Charles and Ball found a crate of rotten oranges; the two students took them to their rooms, set up a catapult with pieces of rubber and fired the oranges out over the Mound across to Princes Street below. We do not know if in the dark, they hit anyone, but citizens were amazed next day to see oranges lying beneath the trees in Princes Street Gardens.
During this friendship with Richard, Charles wrote his best and most carefree love sonnet:
The Beechwood, 5th Feb 1910
Tired we are of people and the waving town –
While on every beech bough hot buds burst and grow
To a radiant wonder of greenness: we will go
Now into the green woods and lie lightly down,
Lie down and watch the sun fluttering through green leaves;
I will lie still and just gaze on you where you lie,
And you will smile to see the delicate new sky
Pierce those silken curtains that the green beech weaves.
Happy, happy dreamers! But before evening:–
While gentle, like the spirit of some slain young thing
A white moon creeps up where little clouds go racing;–
We will rise and shake off last year’s brown leaves that cling,
And cross the valley slowly, slowly climb the hill
Then laugh to hear our respectable streets so still.9
Richard was a gentle soul who understood him. There is a diffuse eroticism in the hot buds bursting, the delicate new sky piercing the silken curtains, and the slain young thing. But the gap between wishful poetic imagery and actual physical love is unclear and we will never know the full nature of their relationship. However, the lovers in the poem do laugh at respectability – the avoidance of which seemed easier on visits to the more populous south where he could be anonymous. Here he was to meet Philip Bainbrigge, a man who did become his lover.
Charles did not discuss politics in his letters, but 1910 was an unusual year. In July Charles went to Cambridge ‘with Bainbrigge and a man Spring Rice who is a Nationalist from Kerry. We had tea with Francis Birrell, the son of the man who runs Ireland.’10 The first general election that year brought in a Liberal Government with the Irish nationalists holding the balance of power. In return for their support the liberals promised to bring in a Home Rule Bill. It seemed to many that Home Rule for Ireland was inevitable. Charles was merely a ringside spectator, ‘When we got b
ack I routed out Bewley … from the Euston Hotel, and we set the two Nationalists to converse one with the other. Bainbrigge and I sat awestruck watching them, and supped.’11
Philip Bainbrigge was at Trinity College with Charles’s old schoolfriend Ralph Wright. He was the elder son of a London clergyman, had been a King’s scholar at Eton, before going up to Cambridge as a classical scholar. Philip later came to Edgemoor for visits and fitted in well with the family as his mother had come from Lanark herself. He gave Charles an edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse and a manuscript copy of his explicit version of Plato’s Symposium, both of which Charles treasured. Philip was an exceptional Classicist, but despite his ‘incalculable breadth and depth of classical and modern reading’, as Charles wrote years later, he was ‘creative only in correspondence, in light verse, parodies and ballads of a topical and private kind’. Being too racy for publication, not many have survived. However, one of his clerihews was judged by the inventor of the form, E. C. Bentley, to be a perfect example,
The Emperor Pertinax
Kept a certain axe
With which he used to strike
Men whom he did not like.12
Striking men with axes was far from Philip’s own nature. He was described as ‘a tall, delicate weedy man with very thick glasses in his spectacles without which he was as blind as a bat’.13 His forehead was large, with a thin receding hairline; a Greek nose in profile, delicate straight lips, ears that stuck out noticeably from his rounded head, steady brown eyes and a clear complexion. He later taught at Shrewsbury and was remembered as a brilliant young sixth-form schoolmaster, though a natural reserve and diffidence caused him to hide his erudition. Philip became more than a friend, as Charles wrote in a poem much later,