The idyll was interrupted in July when Bunny went to Germany. Fearing that he was idling away his time, with the assistance of Ford Madox Hueffer, Constance found Frau Heider, a Prussian widow, with whom Bunny would lodge in the town of Boppard on the banks of the Rhine, some twenty-five kilometres south of Koblenz. There he would learn German. Before his departure, Bunny received a letter: ‘My dear boy’, it began, ‘You have come to an age when new instincts & feelings may at any time put you in a position of the greatest temptation and danger.’ The letter warned against ‘a moment’s want of self control’ which might cause ‘the biggest regret & misery for the rest of your life’. In essence, it counselled vigilance against syphilis. ‘You may’, the letter began, ‘within the next few years be led by real love into intimacy with some girl, as I was with your mother before our marriage.’
As you know, I don’t look at these questions from the usual man of the world standard, & such a relation is in reality what I should most wish for your happiness. But you have no right to risk parentage before you are ready for responsibilities. By the use of certain protective coverings – called Malthusian sheaths – this risk can be avoided, & every young man ought to know this & to make it an absolute rule of conduct never to allow himself to be led into sexual intercourse with any woman without this precaution, which eliminates risk of motherhood, & greatly minimizes the risk of contracting disease.10
In its surviving form and ostensibly from Edward, the letter is in Constance’s hand, and seems to have been a draft, perhaps – as it included a number of question marks – for Edward’s comments, or perhaps for Edward to sign as seeming more fitting from father to son. But whichever parent was the originator, this letter was astonishingly liberal in wishing Bunny the same degree of sexual freedom they had enjoyed, whilst counselling against unprotected intercourse. Constance had another reason to impart this advice: as Richard Garnett has pointed out, ‘she believed her father’s terminal illness was locomotor ataxia – by then known to be a consequence of syphilis’.11 Bunny obviously received the letter in some form, for having arrived at Boppard, he replied to Constance, saying how sweet it was ‘to have a mother one can talk to’.12
‘Everything is very nice’, he stiffly informed Constance, although there were discouraging signs, including a celluloid crucifix over his bed.13 The Heider household comprised Frau Heider, her two sons, Wilhelm and Ferdinand and an aged grandmother. Both young men were soldiers of a precise military bearing whom Bunny abhorred for their supercilious treatment of the servant girls. He soon concluded that a month with the Heiders was long enough. Their worthiness grated, they never stopped asking intrusive questions and he found their formality unbearable. Worse, the Heiders were devout Catholics who said grace before and prayers after every meal, and were intent on getting Bunny into church. ‘Various things’, Bunny told Constance, were ‘verboten’, and his hosts insisted on informing him that he was under the scrutiny of the ‘all-seeing eye of God’. The Heiders could not understand Bunny’s lack of Christian faith and so concluded he must be Jewish. He gladly went along with this. As he explained to Constance, ‘they seem to think my name Jewish. David is Biblical – Garnett they regard as Jewish as they should Diamond or any other jewel’.14
Consumed with homesickness, Bunny yearned for the easy informality of his English friendships. Thankfully, relief appeared in the shape of Ford Madox Hueffer and Violet Hunt, visiting Ford’s great-aunt nearby. Bunny was glad to be in convivial company, and on the receiving end of Ford’s customary affection. This interlude was extended by the arrival of Maitland Radford with whom Bunny embarked on a walking tour of the Moselle, where they climbed high above the vineyards bordering the Rhine into forests and upland pastures, spending their nights lodging in a forester’s house. Bunny wanted to see more of the country, but both his allotted time in Germany and money were running out. He decided that Constance might agree to his remaining if he could persuade her that his German would further improve, but he needed to devise a plan which released him from the Heiders. He wrote to Constance explaining that he wanted to stay another three weeks, adding that he hoped Ursula Cox, a cousin of the Oliviers, would join him for a week on her way to Russia. ‘If you see Ursula kiss her for me’, he instructed his mother, ‘& tell her she is a dear & that I am very fond of her’.15 Whether at the prospect of Bunny’s increased fluency or the thought of young love blossoming, Constance agreed. However, Ursula did not take up Bunny’s invitation, aware that he might be developing feelings she could not reciprocate. At this time his emotional state found expression in his writing anguished poems entitled ‘The Agonies of Eighteen’ and ‘Love is a Bird – But What a Fowl is Love’.
Alone again and released from the Heiders’ shackles, Bunny became reckless, spending money he could not afford on hiring rowing boats and ‘expensive dinners & a knife & an automatic fire-machine [a pistol] & picture postcards & another book and coffees & then another coffee & then a seat to hear the band & then tipping a waitress magnificently because she smelled like Bryn’.16 Connie must have been horrified to learn of such extravagance and that her son had resorted to borrowing money from a bookseller. Although Bunny had what his daughter Henrietta Garnett called ‘a Spartan streak’ which ‘made him scorn anything approaching luxury,’17 he also had what his sister-in-law Frances Partridge identified as a streak of recklessness, and it was this which led him, in Germany, to uncontrolled expenditure.
Bunny travelled up the Rhine ‘seeing castles and castles and robber holds & keeps & castles’. ‘Everyone should travel’, he informed Brynhild, ‘it is so educating. It wakes one up. I feel quite different from the sleepy David I was in England.’18 Now broke, he slept in a doss house at Freiberg, and resorted to sleeping out in the forest ‘with my hand on my pistol & my hair bristling.’19 By the time he was due to return home, he was penniless, sending Constance an alarming telegram requesting funds. Fortunately, he was ‘temporarily relieved by dear Ford’ whom he had also wired.20
In early September, Bunny returned to England. Despite its weaknesses, his university application had been a success, and in October he began his course of study in Botany and Zoology at the Royal College of Science in South Kensington. Bunny was fortunate in the calibre of the professors by whom he was taught and for whom he would, ultimately, undertake research. J.B. Farmer was a pioneering botanist in the study of cell structure, who contributed to extending the boundaries of the Darwinian hypothesis of pangenesis (by which cells were understood to share in the transmission of inherited characteristics). In contrast, while both Adam Sedgwick and Clifford Dobell were leading figures in British zoology, neither was in favour of evolutionary theory, but both made vital contributions in their fields. Sedgwick, a one-time colleague and friend of Darwin, rejected his concept of natural selection because he felt it denied God’s will. Dobell was an agnostic, but nevertheless believed evolutionary theory inapplicable to proto-zoology.
Bunny was still hankering after Ursula Cox whom he had come to know when, together with the Ertels’ adopted daughter Lenotchka, she had visited the Oliviers in 1910. Bunny’s ardour was further inflamed by rumours that now in Moscow, Ursula was in love with the Ertels’ adopted son, Kirik Levin. When Bunny announced that he wanted to spend his Easter vacation in Moscow, his parents somehow managed to fund the trip.
Bunny found a room in the apartment block where Ursula and her mother lodged with the Ertels. He was taken to a supper party where he encountered his competitor, Kirik Levin and realised he was no threat. Bunny’s letters to Constance were filled with long talks with Mme Ertel, visits to the opera, excursions to estates, expeditions to horse shows and tours of the Kremlin. ‘Oh this is a divine city!’ ‘What a jumble this place is – what a mixture of riches & poverty – of luxury & disease & misery – of civilization and of Barbarism – and of order & anarchy. It has the best and the worst of everything in the world.’21 His letters were full of everything except Ursula.
Bunny had sai
d nothing to Ursula about his feelings and thought she was unaware of the reason for his visit. Outside on a wintry evening after a party, when Bunny eventually confessed love, Ursula gently replied that she was not in love with him. He felt the rejection strongly, although writing to Connie he assumed a brave face: ‘I can’t tell you anything about my feelings […]. Because I don’t want to tell anyone how I feel & because whenever one sets anything on paper it becomes false & exaggerated […]. So all I can say is that I am very lucky & happy in seeing Ursula at all and that I don’t regret having come to Moscow in the least.’22 Bunny returned to London in time to begin the new term on 25 April, having resolved to throw himself into his work. He did well that term, easily passing the end of year exams and coming second in the first class, though scrutinising the results list, he automatically searched for his name in the second class, and not finding it, assumed he had failed.
Bunny was tall for a man of his generation – nearly six foot – good looking – but as photographs reveal, he still had a full, rather chubby face and a figure as yet un-moderated by both the vanity and vigorous exercise of years to come. Bunny looked young for his nineteen years and it was perhaps this boyish gaucheness which brought out a little more than the maternal instinct in Antonia Almgren, a thirty-one-year-old woman who sought refuge from an unhappy marriage that summer, at The Cearne.
Tony Almgren was ‘thin and a little worn by her experiences, with huge dark eyes and a slight peculiarity in speech – a difficulty in pronouncing her r’s, which being overcome gave them too much emphasis’.23 When Bunny flew off his bicycle, cracking an elbow and spraining a wrist in the process, Tony was at hand to provide relief in the form of vibratory massage, which involved her leaning across him in order to manipulate his elbow. As Bunny remarked, healing one kind of inflammation only gave rise to another. After several physiotherapy sessions, he took the pragmatic step and plucked up courage to ask whether he could become her lover. Permission was granted, on condition that he obtained contraceptives. These he procured, naturally enough, from a ‘bicycle tyre and hot water bottle shop’.24 And so began Bunny’s first sexual relationship. It was not a love affair, for he never felt love for Tony, recognising that she did not love him. Nevertheless, while a dutiful college student during the week, Bunny found it gratifying to think of his weekends as the lover of a married woman. Gradually he saw her less often, and then not at all. He thought that Constance, perhaps, had nudged Tony towards him. Afterwards he vowed never to become involved in a sexual relationship unless he was in love. Bunny thought it curious, at the time, that his uncle, Arthur Garnett, a friend and confidant of Tony’s, said he thought Bunny had ‘managed very well to break off with her’.25
Some time in 1911, dressed as an Indian prince, Bunny attended a fancy-dress party in aid of Women’s Suffrage at Crosby Hall, Chelsea. Although there were several people there whom he knew, including Maitland Radford, Godwin Baynes and the Olivier girls, he felt ill at ease. He recognised that the party consisted of ‘one big family’ whose ‘members can gossip with each other until outside contacts are made, or shyness has worn off’. In contrast, he observed, the only child ‘walks awkwardly across the slippery floor, simply because he is too embarrassed to stand still any longer’.26 Bunny attempted conversation with lantern-jawed Adrian Stephen, whose sister Virginia, standing next to him, rushed across the room to greet a friend. Bunny was transfixed when James Strachey and his sister Marjorie danced a pas-de-deux down the centre of the hall. It was all so exotic and unfamiliar. Bunny’s old friends were beginning to pair off, but not with him. The gauche science student did pluck up courage to dance with a shy young woman with wide spaced brown eyes, dark hair and an olive complexion. He was rather taken with her, but it would be ten years before he encountered her again.
Chapter Five
‘Work and love – they are curiously intermingled & neither can be complete without the other.’1
Looking back upon his time at university, Bunny recognised that he ‘longed not for one friend, or sweetheart even, but a whole roomful who would provide a feast of intellect, a flow of soul, fountains of love. Of course at twenty I believed that I wanted love […] But I didn’t. I wanted what I might have had if I had been educated at Cambridge and which I missed at South Kensington. To live among a lot of people who are open and intimate with each other.’2
As the Neo-Pagan companions of Bunny’s youth grew up, they were absorbed into the social circle Bunny had encountered at Crosby Hall, where Bloomsbury and Cambridge merged with Hampstead and Limpsfield. James Strachey embodied this amalgamation: he was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and a Cambridge Apostle, in love with Rupert Brooke but loved by Noel Olivier. Five years Bunny’s senior, James was studious looking and bespectacled, the youngest of the ten Strachey siblings. He would later translate Freud’s published work into English, but at this time he was assistant editor of the Spectator. At Crosby Hall, Bunny had looked shyly upon the Stracheys and Stephens, and it would be a while before he felt comfortable in their presence. But in March 1912 James Strachey began to court twenty-year-old Bunny, showering him with invitations to the theatre, concerts, parties, dinners and the country; some were accepted, others politely declined or evaded with excuses of headaches or over-work.
Bunny came across variously as boyishly exuberant, shy, charming, affectionate and demonstrative. It was a fetching mix. But he had no idea of how attractive others found him. In James’s company, he readily adopted the characteristic and contagious ‘Strachey voice’, with its arch expressions of sexual innuendo, without realising the implications of such mannerisms. ‘I want you to tell me things’, he wrote to James in Strachey-ese, ‘And later on we must have some orgies. Yes orgies – with Noel and so on.’3 Quite apart from the fact that Bunny knew such a proposal was preposterous (Noel was studying medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women and was not the type to indulge in orgies), he seemed not to comprehend the impact he had on people and sometimes unwittingly conveyed the wrong message. James told Rupert that he was enjoying ‘the usual mild flirtation with Bunny’.4 Perhaps Bunny was uncertain what message he wanted to convey as his feelings for Godwin Baynes, though unacknowledged, were clearly more than platonic.
Bunny was fond of James, but felt the need to proceed cautiously, as James was obviously interested in him in a way which Bunny found confusing. On the one hand he delighted in James’s company, but on the other he periodically retreated from it. Having already missed a trip to the theatre with James, Bunny could not refuse a weekend with him in Surrey. Writing afterwards, Bunny admitted: ‘I was very stupid all the time but it is a mood which has almost become a habit with me.’5 The stupidity might have been a matter of high spirits, for which Bunny was becoming well known. Equally it may have arisen from confusion about his sexuality or embarrassment over James’s expectations. Having had neither the advantage of a public school or a Cambridge education, Bunny did not come from a male-oriented background where homosexual relationships were relatively common. It was difficult for him to acquire the casual familiarity and easy intimacy of this coterie, to become one of those people who ‘are open and intimate with each other’, which he yearned to be. But Rupert Brooke and James Strachey opened windows onto an appealing fraternal Cambridge world of intellectual camaraderie quite different to that of Imperial College, a world, moreover, of clear sexual undertones for those who knew the code.
The Neo-Pagans were growing up. In 1912 Brynhild Olivier was the first to break away when she married the art historian Hugh Popham. Bunny felt it was time that he fell in love, but could not decide with whom. His gaze alighted upon Godwin’s fiancée, Rosalind Thornycroft. While Godwin was in Dresden, Bunny planned to take Rosalind on an expedition up the Severn. His hopes were thwarted when they were joined by that earlier object of his unrequited love, Ursula Cox and by Theodore Williams, a Jamaican friend of the Oliviers. Bunny’s diary is full of the colour of sinking boats, high jinks and camaraderie, all
nuanced with the shade of nostalgia. ‘When? when shall it ever be again?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Oh how I love those three companions.’6 It was as though Bunny wanted to escape adolescence but at the same time could not quite make the leap into adulthood.
That summer Bunny travelled to Munich to attend a course of botanical lectures. He had arranged to meet Harold Hobson there, but pending Harold’s arrival, Bunny was alone, although he attended a fancy dress party, in the now obligatory guise of an Indian prince. He was delighted to receive a letter from D.H. Lawrence, inviting him to Icking, some sixteen miles south of Munich, where Lawrence was living with Frieda Weekley. Bunny looked forward to meeting Lawrence as he was one of Edward’s authors, and both Lawrence and Frieda had stayed with Edward at The Cearne in Bunny’s absence. Lawrence had earlier written to Edward: ‘We should love to see David […]. Send him to see us here.’7 He also wrote to Bunny, explaining ‘I am living with a lady who is not my wife, but who goes as my wife down here in Bavaria’. He assumed Bunny would find him easy to recognise at the railway station, because ‘I look frightfully English, and so I guess do you, so there is no need for either of us to carry the Union Jack for recognition’.8
On 24 July Bunny arrived and was met at the station by a man with ‘the most beautiful, lovely, blue eyes.’ Bunny described Lawrence as ‘slight in build, with a weak, narrow chest and shoulders’, but with a ‘fair height’, and light movements which ‘gave him a sort of grace’. In the crowded station, Bunny, who always liked to compare people to animals, thought him ‘a mongrel terrier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians, English to the bone’. He was charmed by Lawrence’s sparkling eyes, which, he felt, seemed to invite him to join in some fun: ‘I could no more hold out against it than a well-behaved spaniel can resist the mongrel terrier’s invitation to slip off poaching.’9 The two men hit it off immediately.
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