Sylvia Townsend Warner

by Claire Harman

  On 22 September 1913, a week after their return from Tushielaw, the Warners received a telegram at High Street. Sylvia heard a noise like an animal howling and hurrying to discover what had happened found that the howling animal was her mother. George was rigid and silent: the telegram said that Flora had been run over by a taxi in Sloane Square and was dead. The shock of the news did not register so powerfully with Sylvia at that moment as did the inhuman noise it had called out of her mother.

  Flora was buried with her husband at Alfold four days later. She had been a model matriarch, combining very strong maternal affections with a lively-minded independence, and the family was never so united again. For her part, Sylvia, the last Warner, held to her grandmother’s example of right-thinking and doing, and appreciated increasingly throughout her life Flora’s subtly admirable character. ‘It all stemmed from her, all the high-minded good sense and latent wild emotion of the family, all the force and direction and sense of romance mixed with realism and contempt of balderdash – the impetuosity with which she would stamp on nonsense or pettiness, and the melancholy that underlies love.’49

  Early the following year, 1914, George bought a piece of land and a piece of river at the edge of Dartmoor, possibly using some of the money inherited from his mother. He wanted to build a house which could be used for holidays and at the same time nurtured towards his retirement. South Devon was home ground for both him and Nora, the moor had all the wildness of landscape he loved, and there was room for a large garden, gardening being a passion neither had ever been able to indulge sufficiently in Harrow. There was no debate over who should be the architect – it was just the job to help young Ronald along.

  The result, Little Zeal, was a comfortable Georgian villa with half-panelling in the hall, ‘rational’ cupboards and exclusive fishing rights. It was also damp, had no electricity and was isolated from even the inadequate shops of South Brent, but if that was the price for not having neighbours, the Warners were prepared to pay it. George and Ronald together did much of the carpentry for the house, dynamite was applied where Nora wanted a rock garden and a local man patrolled with a gun in their absence to establish order on land that was already home to countless rabbits and moles. There were to be no servants, for Little Zeal was undertaken by George and Nora in the spirit of adventure.

  Sylvia, who in 1914 was in her twenty-first year, was not expected to be one of the permanent fixtures at Little Zeal, although she had a room of her own there: ‘I was young, sullen, exalted, lay awake with toothache and La Cathedrale [presumably La Cathédrale engloutie, one of Debussy’s 1909 Préludes], and dressed my hair like a Velasquez infanta by candlelight.’50 She had planned to leave home that year for the Continent, where it is said she was to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg. It is intriguing to speculate on what might have come of her career as a composer under the influence of this challenging teacher, whose pupils included Webern, Alban Berg and Bax, but the opportunity was lost in the course of events of 1914. Sylvia continued composing, probably under the supervision of the Royal College of Music, where she was well-known through her association with Buck, and she began at the same time to study the music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She was trying her hand at writing stories and sketches at this time, and the earliest poem in her first book The Espalier (published in 1925), ‘Hymn for a Child’, is of this date. The story of Jesus and the elders in the temple is treated not as an example of virtue, but of consummate canniness and the last stanza is typical of Sylvia’s barbed wit:

  Teach me, gentle Saviour

  Such discreet behaviour

  That my elders be

  Always pleased with me

  It is unlikely that this is the only poem of that period. ‘Morning’, also in The Espalier, but undated, could be:

  The long, long-looked-for night has sped

  ‘Tis time we should arise

  Out of this tossed and blood-stained bed

  Where a dead woman lies.

  In 1914 the whole family went up to Ettrick as usual at the end of July. The news from Europe was bad, but only on 1 August did George note in his holiday diary, ‘serious risk of war’, and that certain friends were not coming up to join them. Germany declared war on Russia the next day. In their sitting-room at the inn, Sylvia listened to the men discussing the news: ‘[Geoffrey Sturt] sat, his eyes burning, saying we must fight or France would be lost – it was France, not Belgium; while my father and Philip Wood, almost as theoretical in knowledge of war as he, sat by, grievedly consenting to the burden of the young men.’51 On the 3rd, George went out fishing; the water had been very low for days but now was rising. He came home and ‘devoured’ the papers, but was dispirited by ‘our folk hesitating’. On the 4th the papers, which had to be fetched from a couple of miles away, were suggesting that something was going to be done, which heartened George, and in the evening came the news of Britain’s ultimatum.

  News that war had been declared came through on 5 August. ‘Good egg’, wrote George, ‘now or later, and now is better.’ Geoffrey Sturt went off to enlist on the 6th. The Warners’ holiday went on as before, the walks and fishing and outdoor lunches, with little to disturb it but an alarm about the availability of petrol. George finished and despatched his book On the Writing of English and followed what scant and confused news there was of the war; the invasion of Belgium, the beginnings of a Belgian Resistance, the loss of the Amphion. It was all ‘anxious and depressing’, on top of which George had been smitten by a ‘Mysterious Plague’, a chronic pain which forced him to lie down. Then the first letters began to arrive from ex-pupils joining up: Ron Eiloart had joined the R.A.M.C. during the first week of the war. August 12th came and went and was particularly disappointing that year at Tushielaw – not a shot. They left for Harrow early, ‘and that was the end of our summers at Tushielaw, and of the world I was born into.’52

  By the time school reconvened in September, the country was plunged into one of the most anxious periods of the war, a situation ‘so acute, so swiftly changing and so menacing that years seemed to have passed instead of eight weeks’, as George wrote in an article for the Cornhill Magazine. ‘One wondered, as the train brought one back, whether Harrow could be the same. And on walking up the hill it was almost a shock to find no obvious change in the familiar surroundings.’53 Rumours, which had reached as far as Ettrick, that the school had been taken over by the army, all proved false. The greatest noticeable difference was that a number of members of staff were absent and that the school rifles had been removed and replaced with a few carbines (later replaced in turn by wooden dummies).

  The idealism which flooded the recruiting-stations, though much the same in spirit as was instilled in his boys at school, obscured, in George Warner’s opinion, an important issue, ‘that armies cannot in a moment be bought with money, that brave men are not soldiers, and that what is needed is not so much the will to fight as the will to make ready’.54 ‘Improvised Armies’ was the subject of the first of an influential series of articles by Warner which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine during the war. The topics he chose – civilian control, divergent operations (in answer to the debilitating quarrels among our own leaders over the multiple fronts), recruiting, compulsory service, blockades and the neutrality of the United States – show how closely he followed the strategic developments in the war and how quick he was to react to them. His essays for Blackwood’s were startling because not overtly opinionated: his arguments were taken from historical precedent, thoroughly researched and clearly presented. He was amused to see how the newspapers in January 1916 were ‘all gradually taking up my Blackwood article [‘Recruiting in Wartime’] and quoting its facts as if they had known them all their born days’.55 They were read with interest at the War Office too.

  In the first few months of the war Sylvia had attached herself to an organisation in Harrow which had been thrown together under the ambiguous name of War Help. Much of its activity was concerned with f
und-raising for the Red Cross, but when the first Belgian refugees began arriving in London, the War Help committee applied itself to find homes for them. Sylvia, whose mind was essentially practical, thought it would be less disruptive to the Belgians (and the people of Harrow) to house the refugees together. First one, then two empty houses were lent her and the local tradesmen and householders provided fittings. One of the refugees, a young Belgian woman, remained in affectionate correspondence with Sylvia for the rest of her life and it is clear that Sylvia’s youthful concern and curiosity heartened the refugees, if only by providing a talking-point.

  Both Sylvia and her father kept up a flow of correspondence to Old Harrovians at the front and heard their first-hand accounts of conditions in this new, peculiarly ungentlemanly type of warfare. From a military hospital in Boulogne, Eric Milner-White wrote of how he and one of George’s best pupils, Geoffrey Hopley, passed the time by talking of Harrow and the man who had been housemaster and history teacher to both of them. White was an army chaplain, Hopley a Grenadier guardsman dying of wounds, alternately bored by inactivity and furious at ‘“those damned Germans” who have put his year at Harvard in such jeopardy’. ‘Greetings from your history school here assembled!’56 wrote White cheerily. Hopley could not write. His arm was wounded, his thigh shot through. He was plagued by nightmares of legs and died after three months’ feverish pain. The Harrovian was given over more and more to obituary notices of young men such as this. The roll of honour read out in School chapel every Sunday, a mangled form of previous years’ class lists, lengthened steadily.

  At the start of the war, the atmosphere at the school had been excited; maps, flags and charts of ships and losses on both sides were put up around the place. There was no great rush into the O.T.C. because 470 out of 500 boys were already in it. George delivered a series of special lectures to them which were collected in book form as How Wars Were Won. The Warners did not go to Ettrick again, but spent every holiday at Little Zeal, where much basic garden work was still to be done. Nora looked on critically as George resorted to a chemical mixture to kill ribbon grass, while Sylvia tarred the gate – ‘and everything else’57. When they went back in the summer of 1915 the ribbon grass was still there, but this time George watched while Nora darted to and fro, as if the weeds were trying to escape. The hay was still standing in the fields in September: the old and garrulous labourer, whose only available assistant was the local idiot, stood with his scythe on the Warner’s porch and declared he’d never seen the like. As soon as the first heavy garden work was over, the Warners were planning a new project, diverting the stream which ran along their ground: ‘If we are lucky enough to see Ron home again we will turn him onto this job: He and N. shall design it; and he and I will make it.’58 Ron was writing regularly from the front and sending little gifts back to Nora – bulbs from Flanders, lace from Valenciennes.

  Late in 1915, Sylvia saw a notice in the paper about a scheme to train women of the leisured class in munition-making to relieve the regular hands, as factories were now working non-stop. She applied to join it and received a pamphlet instructing her that ‘low-heeled shoes are advisable, and evening dress is not necessary.’ A few weeks later, Sylvia was living in dismal lodgings in Erith, south of the Thames, and making her way to Vickers’ factory for a night shift as a shell machinist:

  Through the open doors of the workshop came noise and light and warmth: it looked as gay as a ballroom. Once inside it, the place wrapped me round like a familiar garment. Up in the roof the big driving-belt slid over the rollers: I thought of them going on shift after shift, day after day like a waterfall sliding over the top of a crag. Shell-cases, 4.5s and 18-pounders, were piled high against the walls and stacked on every spare foot of floor, with numbers and hieroglyphics chalked on their grey sides and sleek faces. […] All the driving belts in motion dazzle the eyes like a mist, and looking across row after row of machines, the other side of the shop seemed a mile away. Last of all one notices the workers, inconspicuous, inconsiderable – mere human beings among these infallible Titans of iron and belting.59

  In this noisy, stifling and intimidating environment Sylvia worked an eight-hour shift with a half-hour break, along with the other ‘lady-workers’ – the members of the dilution scheme – whom the regular hands referred to as the Miaows. Her work was mostly at base-facing shells, that is, paring down a steel shell-case the size of a large jam-pot to the correct length, ascertained by gauges and scales. It took about fifteen minutes to complete the process for each shell and the work was both monotonous and difficult: ‘After a while it begins to flatten one into the essential dough: every shell thieves a little of one’s pride of self,’ Sylvia observed, and though dead tired herself at the end of a shift, she realised how much worse things were for the ‘regulars’, men and women ‘bone-weary, working the long hours of necessity, living in the vitiated air of the shop, where the noise eats them like a secret poison’.60

  The regular factory girls were surprisingly young, vigorous and high-spirited, and their hair was noticeably healthy. ‘Comparing them with the anaemic and toothless young women that I had seen bicycling listlessly in country lanes, I thought – Gone is the rustic mirth with the rustic junketings. Allegra has painted her cheeks and come to town.’61 Talk among the women was not of the war – a taboo subject – but of their work and, most commonly of all, food. Sylvia, vainly searching the streets of Erith for a pie shop, behaved in a way unthinkable in Harrow. She approached a policeman and said, ‘Policeman, I’m hungry.’

  Undertaking factory work, when any work was considered unsuitable for a young lady of Sylvia’s class, must have endowed her with an aura of oddity and daring in the eyes of her own society; certainly it was meant to. Thinking ahead to the time when she could look back on it all was one way of passing the time: ‘Like Stevenson combatting the sensitive plant at Valima, standing at my lathe I talked wittily and at length with my friends that were not there.’ Or she would follow in imagination the whole process of shell-production: ‘the molten steel being poured out, statelily, like cream: the shell-cases tumbled out on the workshop floor all rough and clumsy, to pass through process after process till, slim and polished, they went off to be filled, discreet of curve, demure of colour, Quakerish instruments of death: and that one day when, alive and voiced at last, they would go shrieking over the trenches.’62 Sylvia was only part of this scheme for a few months. A longer-serving Miaow pointed out to her colleagues, shivering in their hut during the seven-minute break allowed at 4.30 a.m.: ‘When you’ve been at it longer you won’t think of your shells as so many dead Boches or live Tommies, but as so many pre-destined objects that you want to get through before you go off work – so many dead weights to be heaved up and slipped on a gauge – so many inches of backache.’

  George encouraged Sylvia to write an article about her experiences at Vickers and the result was an eight-thousand word piece called ‘Behind the Firing Line’ which Blackwood’s accepted in January and published in February 1916. Sylvia’s name did not appear: it was attributed to ‘a Lady Worker’, but she was paid handsomely for it, sixteen guineas, as compared with the six shillings, including bonus, she earned per shift in the munitions factory. It was the only published work of Sylvia that her father ever saw.

  The war was going badly in 1916. The Battle of Jutland, a near-disaster, was the nearest thing the British had had to a victory. On 5 June Lord Kitchener died in a mine explosion off the Orkneys and Lloyd George, who took over the War Office, began the thankless task of trying to impress a new strategy on Haig and Robertson, his Chief-of-Staff. The newspapers were full of maps showing every movement of the Allied forces on the Western Front and alongside the grim lists of losses in the ranks – thousands every day – published advertisements for ‘war’ products which could in many cases be despatched from a London store straight to the trenches: the luminous ‘Active Service’ watch, bullet-proof jackets (officer type only) and Dr Miller’s Nutrient for ‘th
e prevention of nervous breakdown by timely “nourishment of the nerves” ’.63 On 1 July the Battle of the Somme began and was to last more than four months, with unprecedented British losses. It was during this summer that George Warner was asked by the Foreign Office to undertake ‘a work of national importance’ – what work remains unknown, but he accepted, and arranged for his form work at Harrow to be suspended. Nora’s brother Frank Hudleston, who was Principal Librarian at the War Office and a military historian, was also engaged on secret war work. His youngest sister Purefoy guessed as much, for suddenly Frank had no holidays or spare time, but ‘naturally I was never told anything’.64 After the war, the French Government made him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. On hearing that George Warner was going to be working for the government, a pupil wrote to him from France: ‘It is a real recognition and tribute, and it has all come about so quietly and naturally out of the even, hidden labour of days and years.’65 Undoubtedly George felt honoured, but he was not complacent and went down to Little Zeal after a fortnight of nationally important work with a great deal on his mind.