Bloomsbury's Outsider (4 page)

It was as well that food was copious, as there would be little in the way of nourishment on the next stage of their odyssey. On 28 June they set out for Tula Province to visit Sasha. Although Constance still had misgivings about the visit, she felt compelled to see her friend, who had by then been summoned to care for a
sick relative, with only a few days remaining before her departure. Arriving in Tula, Connie and Bunny were surprised to find no carriage waiting, and no other means of accomplishing the fifteen mile journey to the Yershovs. After two hours, a carriage eventually arrived, Yershov having at the last minute decided to send a conveyance. He was not happy about their visit, and in consequence Constance and Bunny had to lodge in the local school mistress's house. Although they found Sasha warm and welcoming, her husband was unsmiling and opinionated. They hoped to visit Tolstoy, at Yasnaya Polyana less than twenty miles away, but Yershov disapproved of Tolstoy and would not make available his carriage.

At Sasha's there was no boiled water except at tea-time; nor was there sufficient food. One day they waited until four o'clock for some barely edible bread. There were no shops: they could eat only what they were given. The food was covered in flies, leading Yershov to ask Constance whether flies were such a problem in England. (Diplomatically she replied that flies weren't, but wasps were.) Constance could not sleep, for their room had no blinds and it was light all night. Eventually Bunny procured some nails from a local boy, and hung a rug at the window. Connie felt insecure, worried lest either of them became ill, and anxious about getting sufficient boiled water for Bunny, who, she told Edward, ‘was always thirsty & kept his promise to you heroically'.
²⁷
She regretted not leaving Bunny behind with the Ertels, as Madame Ertel had urged her to do. Having endured this ordeal for five days, Constance decided to return to the Ertels, where she hoped Bunny would recoup the weight he had lost. ‘David is awfully glad to get back to all his friends', she told
Nellie, ‘all the kind dear men & boys on the estate. Everyone there seems really to love him.'
²⁸

Constance was relieved to spend a further month with the Ertels, though she had begun to count the days to home. However, two weeks after their return from Tula, Constance became ill with recurrent diarrhoea. She and Bunny were alone, the Ertels away for a week. Constance could not have managed without Bunny's devoted care. He was her comfort, ‘so good & responsible', getting up every night to warm milk for her. While Constance recovered, they heard that Vyacheslav Plehve, the Minister of the Interior, had been assassinated (on 28 July). Mindful of the censor, Constance could only tell Edward that this news ‘produced an immense sensation as you can imagine'.
²⁹

On 6 August Constance and Bunny began their journey home. ‘We felt so sad at parting from everyone', she wrote to Edward, ‘The boy shed a few tears when he said goodbye to the men & lads in the stables & one or two of them cried too'.
³⁰
This time they travelled almost entirely by train, arriving in England on 13 August. Five months later, Russia was overcome by the turmoil of massacre and revolution which followed Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905. The peasants turned on their masters' property, burning houses, palaces and farms. Ertel's property was left unscathed; in his absence, Yershov's house burnt to the ground.

‘At times I feel as if I were born for the salvation of the world – at times as if I would never be more than a travelling tinker – never anything in between—That I suppose is youth.'
¹

Constance turned her attention again to the question of Bunny's education. He had a genuine abhorrence of school, hated feeling that he had to conform, that he was being controlled, that he couldn't do as he pleased. What mattered most was freedom. Children, Bunny said later, ‘have to get right away from parents and schoolmasters and safeguards and to have nobody to consider but themselves'.
²
Bunny believed he was different from other people and that the rules governing them did not apply to him. As a child, he acquired self-resilience, intellectual independence and a disregard for convention. As an
only
child, he had no sense of deference to his parents or their generation but engaged
with them equally. This was perhaps unusual, but it enabled him to see the world uncompromisingly on his own terms and shaped a powerful will and an expectation that he could do as he liked.

In May 1905 Edward told Galsworthy that the thirteen-year-old Bunny ‘reminds me extraordinarily of what I was at 13 – his expression, and gait, and everything bring back my boyhood to me. He is interested in
everything
, and never
does
anything!'
³
This idleness would not last, as in September Bunny was sent to University College School on Gower Street in London, not far from the British Museum. Constance and Edward changed places, Edward basing himself at The Cearne, while Constance rented a flat at 19 Grove Place, Hampstead. As Bunny put it, they exchanged the ‘confusion and muddle of The Cearne' for the ‘Spartan amenities of a workman's flat in Hampstead', an inexpensive area only recently integrated into London, inhabited by artisans, artists, writers and musicians.
⁴

‘Every day', Bunny later wrote, ‘I went to my hated school on a horse drawn tram through streets which were absolutely empty of any of the things I found interesting. At thirteen, I did not like looking at human beings, or shops, or buildings.'
⁵
He found his new school dreary and intellectually dull; he hated the institutional smell, and a self-conscious outsider, felt excluded by his peers. Worse, he had to participate in the school cadet force. A few days after starting school he suffered the humiliation of wetting himself on a prolonged march. Unused to school-boy
banter and unable to withstand bullying, this indignity overshadowed his school career. Finding he could no longer exert control over his life, Bunny's placid nature gave way to angry outbursts.

Relief came at weekends and holidays at The Cearne where he continued the independent and solitary education he enjoyed. On one occasion he walked ten miles by footpath from The Cearne to Sevenoaks Weald, to visit Edward Thomas and his family. At this time Thomas was not yet a poet, but a writer of fine, lyrical prose. Bunny found him beautiful in countenance and demeanour. They got on well, partly through a shared admiration for Richard Jefferies and partly because Thomas was interested in Bunny's conversation and they always found things to talk about. They both loved the natural world, and walking in the countryside with Thomas, Bunny began to see it through his older friend's eyes.

After two years at University College School, Bunny seemed to have made no academic progress. Constance decided, therefore, that he should attend a crammer, University Tutorial College in Red Lion Square, near High Holborn. Bunny was delighted: ‘I was a free agent, out of the clutches of tyrants, no longer to be facetiously insulted in public by the masters or tortured in private by the boys. If I played truant and spent the afternoon looking at the mummies in the British Museum, nothing would happen.'
⁶
At college Bunny valued being treated as a rational being, and disliking the enforced camaraderie of institutional life, was glad there was no attempt at social life outside the classroom. He was inspired by the zoology teacher, ‘Flatfish' Cunningham, and it was in zoology and botany that Bunny excelled, and where he found what he believed to be his vocation. He was good at French, but as he acknowledged, ‘Mathematics and English were the
trouble'. It is surprising, perhaps, that such a well-read young man, with access to his parents' libraries and to the conversation of respected writers, should find English a difficult subject. But his approach was instinctive and aural; he found grammar a waste of time and was always an eccentric punctuator.

In Hampstead, Bunny's neighbours were writers, artists and intellectuals. He met the poets Ernest and Dollie Radford and their son Maitland, who introduced Bunny to the ballet, taking him to see Anna Pavlova perform. Maitland was a socialist and a doctor with a well-developed sense of the injustices heaped on the poor in London's East End. Others among the talented younger Hampstead generation were Godwin Baynes, a trainee doctor, who later became Jung's assistant, and his sister Ruth; the brothers Clifford and Arnold Bax, writer and composer respectively; Rosalind Thornycroft, a gifted artist, daughter of the sculptor, Hamo Thornycroft and cousin of Siegfried Sassoon; and the Farjeon siblings, Harry, Joe, the poet Eleanor, and Herbert (Bertie), later a famous dramatist and theatre critic. As with the Hobsons and Oliviers in Surrey, Bunny had found a conducive set of friends. As time passed the two sets overlapped and sometimes merged. Bunny introduced Godwin Baynes to Edward Thomas and Godwin treated Thomas for depression.

Rosalind Thornycroft recalled that during the summer they would ‘get up at about six o'clock to the sound of pheasants calling, walk through the woods, bathe naked in the lakes; climb trees, Godwin reaching the topmost branches to sway in the wind.'
⁷
Ten years Bunny's senior, and at the centre of the group, Godwin Baynes combined physical strength with an aesthetic
sensibility. Handsome, intelligent and charismatic, he inspired devotion in all his followers. According to Bunny, Godwin ‘was about six foot three in height, so broad-chested and strongly built that he did not seem a tall man but a well-proportioned hero of antiquity'.
⁸
Looking back, Bunny observed that Godwin ‘had become an enthusiastic neo-pagan and I myself was just ripe for the neo-pagan revelation'.
⁹

Bunny was to remain a Neo-Pagan until the Great War suspended youthful idealism and slaughtered youthful idealists. But in 1907, when the term ‘Neo-Pagan' had yet to be coined by Virginia Woolf, these young, creative, utopian, socialistic idealists enjoyed conversation and friendship, much of it outdoors. They channelled their physical vigour into swimming, diving and tramping the countryside, and revelled in beauty. But if such appreciation was sexual, this was (for now) sublimated to maintain the illusion of young men and women sleeping or swimming naked together, as brothers and sisters under the stars. Eleanor Farjeon expressed this apparent innocence in her poem,
Pan-Worship
(1908) where she describes the young Apollo (Godwin/Bunny/Maitland?):

With limbs like light and golden locks toss'd back
On a smooth ivory shoulder
¹⁰

Eleanor called Godwin a ‘sun-god', and Bunny echoed this sentiment in relation to all of them: ‘We live the life of pagan Gods
in a heaven we have all created.'
¹¹

Rosalind commented that they ‘were taken up with the idea of the freedom of natural life', and, under Bunny's influence, adopted the habit of carrying a back-pack and sleeping bag, ready to sleep outside.
¹²
Godwin often visited The Cearne, where he slept out in the woods with Bunny and Harold Hobson. He later recalled passing ‘the most beautiful night of my life' with Bunny by his side, sleeping beneath the fir trees ‘on a great mound of sun-dried bracken'.
¹³
At the time Bunny described that very night: ‘We were like two Chrysalids in our bags. Friendly Chrysalids, side by side […]. We were so ecstatic we tried to hug each other.'
¹⁴
Despite protestations to the contrary, there was a sexual sub-text to this ‘natural life', and one that was inevitably sometimes homo-erotically charged.

Bunny still struggled academically, mathematics and English a persistent problem. As he repeatedly failed to matriculate, he remained at the Tutorial College where he began to be drawn into a distinctly shadowy world of darkened rooms, dim halls and clandestine meetings. This began at a revision class of three students where he noticed an ‘exotic brown man' with curly black hair. Having established that his new friend's name was Sukhasagan Dutt and that he was a Bengali, Bunny invited him to lunch at the ABC in Southampton Row, where they got on so well that they agreed to meet the next day at Holborn Baths, for a swim. On 10 March 1909, the day after his seventeenth birthday, Bunny brought Dutt to Hampstead, to meet Constance.
Like his mother, Bunny was always curious about people from other parts of the world; he was neither susceptible to casual racism nor prone to imperialist arrogance. On the contrary, just a few weeks previously, he had copied out a passage from Robert Drury's journal of his captivity in Madagascar, which culminated with the words: ‘if an impartial Comparison was to be made of their Virtue, I think the Negroe Heathens will excel the white Christians'.
¹⁵

Dutt soon became Bunny's closest friend, introducing the young Englishman to his Indian friends whom Bunny discovered were ‘lively and innocent young men, always full of jokes and leg-pulls, little excitements and enthusiasms'.
¹⁶
It was not long, however, before he encountered a less frivolous side. Dutt believed he was under surveillance as his brother had been imprisoned in India for making the bomb thrown at an English magistrate at Midnapore, resulting in the deaths of two English women. Although Dutt was training in London for the Bar, as a result of his brother's activities he realised it was unlikely he would ever practise, and, according to Bunny, decided to become an actor. In his autobiography, Bunny asserts that Dutt was against terrorism, but it was Dutt who first took Bunny to attend a meeting at India House, in Highgate, the London base of Indian nationalism, a ‘powerhouse for every kind of sedition.'
¹⁷
Here he was introduced to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the charismatic Bengali leader of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain.